18,000 Cattle Die in Texas Dairy Farm Explosion
Overheated electrical equipment is suspected as the cause of the blaze, which ignited the methane-rich cow waste.
We have been following disturbing incidents regarding the nation’s food processing facilities and farms in the past several months.
There is now another incident to add to this list.
Approximately 18,000 cows were killed, and one person was critically injured, in an explosion at a dairy farm in the Texas Panhandle on Monday.
The Castro County Sheriff’s Office confirmed with Fox News Digital that the cows were in a holding area before being brought in for milking when the blast occurred at the Southfork Dairy Farm in Dimmitt.
Very few cows in the holding area survived, officials told local outlet KFDA.
“Your count probably is close to that. There’s some that survived, there’s some that are probably injured to the point where they’ll have to be destroyed,” Castro County Sherif Sal Rivera told KFDA.
The scale of this fire is historic.
According to the Animal Welfare Institute, this fire is by far the deadliest barn fire for cattle overall and the most devastating barn fire in Texas since they began tracking barn fires in 2013.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Amarillo Region arrived on scene at around 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday and are assisting the dairy owner with carcass disposal/debris issues.
Nearly 6.5 million farm animals have perished in barn fires since 2013, according to an AWI analysis.
NewsChannel 10 has reached out to the Texas Commission of Environmental Quality.
They have a crew on the scene that is assessing the damage.
The cause of the fire is being investigated. Overheated electrical equipment is suspected as the cause of the blaze, which ignited the methane-rich cow waste.
The cause of the fire has not yet been confirmed, though Castro County Sheriff Sal Rivera told KCBD on Tuesday that early speculation is that methane may have been ignited by overheating electrical equipment used to suck out waste from the holding pens.
The state fire marshal is investigating the cause of the fire.
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Comments
No evidence of sabotage?
It is clear from comments below that few people understand how farms operate. The is a concrete pit under the pen. The floor is made up with cement panels, there are gaps between those panels, and as livestock walks around they push dung through those gaps. The surface is periodically washed down with water.
Pumps move the slurry out of the pits. Those pumps are usually in pairs called a lead-lag system. These are used in a lot of applications and motors are sealed, explosion proof. This type of system is used cities, and also for fresh water distribution and air handling systems with fans instead of pumps.
This kind of disaster would probably be caused by more that one safety system failing, a cascade cause.
For example, say that the pumping system was down for a day or two, allowing more sludge to accumulate, then methane would start accumulating, and say that the ventilation system also failed, and then there was an ignition source, like someone lighting a cigar or what not. Or some other source of a spark, even static electricity.
And then there is the possibility it was sabotage.
You mean my neighbor with 5 milk cows has a different setup than somebody tens of thousands of cows?
I’ve buried several hundred hogs from a hog barn fire before
Not a very pretty or fun thing to do.
Ventilation fan shorting out caused that fire
They don’t clean their barns?
I see that the equipment would have been near the waste, but I have to wonder how thick a layer it was.
Augie never showed up.
Manure pits. I’m assuming that with the environment rules pushed by state and federal that they were capturing the methane in the pits for use as electricity. It’s becoming quite common.
Wow, guess they should have been better about cleaning out the waste. Hell, they could have captured that methane to burn for heating the barns in the winter. On the other hand, that’s a lot of bbq steak.
Should we expect a slip in beef prices in the next few weeks?
Nearly 6.5 million farm animals have perished in barn fires since 2013
Damn that O’Leary!
Also, how many of these have been really big losses like this? How many were small barns and how many were giant facilities?
Overheated electrical equipment is suspected as the cause of the blaze, which ignited the methane-rich cow waste.
Ummm, they keep the waste right there where the cows and milking equipment are? That seems … unsanitary. It’s probably segregated, but if the methane leaks out to where electrical equipment is… that seems bad.
“they keep the waste right there where the cows and milking equipment are?”
The cow keeps them within about 18 inches of each other at all times, and sometimes even operates them simultaneously, so how gold do you want that lily, sir?
I saw this and it broke my heart
I don’t eat beef because I believe cows are very intelligent animals and have sweet natures
I can’t even imagine the fear of these animals
I actually eat very little meat and have a hard time getting enough protein, so I drink a lot of milk.
Mostly fish, chicken
I remember Mary Temple Grandin talking about people who protest meat eating and she said, animals die in nature in most horrible ways and suffer often greatly, that it was much more humane at the meat factories
Unless… someone sabotages it and blows the poor beasts to nano particles and roasts them alive
I remember seeing lions eating alive a zebra….
Never should have eaten that apple Adam…
The end state for most animals in the wild is they either (i) getting eaten by another animal, often while alive or in the process of dying, or (ii) starving to death. In many cases, starving leads to getting eaten.
Cows raised for food generally have pleasant lives, and a very fast, humane end. They don’t know it is coming, and literally, don’t know what hit them. Among reasons for this is to be humane, and another is because meat from a scared, excited animal taste different than one that is not.
meat from a scared, excited animal taste different
That’s why we were told to stroke the bunny and calm it before we killed it in survival. (Though it was likely mostly to increase the destruction of the food aversion barrier.)
I hope you are monitoring your B-12 level.
Nearly 6.5 million farm animals have perished in barn fires
Wow
95% of those were chickens. Egg producers keep flocks numbering in the millions. If you think those numbers are bad, between the first outbreak of Avian flu detected in domestic chickens in February/March 2022 and the end of the year over 52 million chickens were killed. 4.4 million were killed by the disease itself, the rest were culled in an attempt to control its spread.
I hope Dr. Fauci doesn’t follow this blog. I don’t want to give the puppy killer any ideas.
Those numbers are for the U.S. alone.
They had a bad one sometime in the last year or two in Arkansas, at a Tyson “barn”.
PETA has come out demanding “Common Sense” cow laws. I kid you not.
And how would PETA know what a common sense law is having no common sense in any of there membership.
Right message, wrong messenger. PETA is just a front.
I don’t t judge beef eaters and I have to make a lot of meals for my meat eating husband
flashy thingy goes off….
“it was a methane gas explosion”…
Geeky farm fact, the other big scary killer of cow herds is lightning or just errant electricity. Bovines have low tolerance to getting shocked.
Well, every frat guy just assumes they’re lighting each other’s farts and it got out of hand.
Cows and chickens are explosive
And on that note, one of my favorites…
catastrophic anthropogenic [local] climate change
Hold on. 18,000 cows were in a holding area waiting for milking? Not a chance. Even running 3 milkings on an around the clock schedule is that going to happen. No dairy farm has that many milking cows at one time. The logistics are just not happening.
yeah – hence no more family farms.
Yeah, move along, nothing to see here. Just one more of the hundreds of farm and food facilities being destroyed…completely at random, of course.
“The flash of light you saw in the sky was not a UFO (food processing facility being destroyed). Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus.”
Yeah, an explosion this large caused by cow farts? I’d say more likely that’s udder bull shit.