More than 18,000 cows were killed on Monday in a fire at South Fork Dairy Farm in Dimmitt, Texas.
Authorities received several calls that employees were trapped in a milking facility, with at least one worker sent to the hospital in critical condition after he was rescued by first responders, according to a report from NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth. Castro County Sheriff Sal Rivera said that a fire from an explosion spread to a building where cattle are held before they are brought to the milking area, according to a report from KFDA, with all of the cows except for a small percentage dying in the disaster. The blaze likely spread through the insulation of the building.
“Your count probably is close to that,” Rivera said with respect to the estimated number of remaining livestock. “There’s some that survived, there’s some that are probably injured to the point where they’ll have to be destroyed.”
Officials with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality assisted workers with disposing of the cattle carcasses. The Animal Welfare Institute said the fire was the deadliest with respect to cattle deaths since the organization started to monitor barn fires one decade ago.
Residents in Dimmitt, a town southwest of Amarillo with less than 5,000 residents, told local media that smoke from the fire was visible for miles. “It was lowkey crazy to hear about because we were just chilling and then we just heard a boom,” Renzo Sullivan said in an interview with KDFA. “Then we look in the distance and there’s just a big cloud.”
“It was crazy because it’s like something like that happening here is like kind of unheard of, you know. So it was just like it was a mind-blowing thing to hear,” Sullivan continued. “It is kind of painful because it’s like that’s kind of what we do here, and that’s how we get our money for like the city and all that. So that’s just a major drop for us.”
Other residents said they were surprised to see the plumes of smoke and were concerned for the economy of Dimmitt. “We look up, we’re inside and we go out and look through the window, and we just see clouds. It was like an explosion,” Maleki Laurent commented. “It was crazy. And there was big, massive black air and it looked like fog in the street. And it was all burnt,” Kennedy Cleraman added.
The disaster in the small town comes after several similar reports of industrial and agricultural accidents across the nation in recent months. The incidents include a blaze at a nursery supply company in Kissimmee, Florida; a crash between a train and semi-truck which resulted in a chemical spill near Splendora, Texas; and a fire at a recycling plant in Richmond, Indiana.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILY WIRE APP
Another train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, was triggered two months ago when a malfunctioning axle caused the vehicle to derail and leak volatile chemicals, impacting the air and water supply of the small rust belt community. Local and state authorities evacuated all residents within one mile of the crash and started a controlled burn of the chemicals to decrease the risk of an explosion. Vinyl chloride, a carcinogen that can contaminate water supplies, was released from five train cars in the form of massive plumes of dark smoke visible throughout eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania.
Researchers from Texas A&M University and Carnegie Mellon University found in February that nine chemicals present on the train had higher concentrations than normal in the town’s air and water supplies, posing the risk of long-term health complications to residents despite the assurances of state and federal public health officials.
