The fire quickly spread through the stables, where thousands of dairy cows were huddled together waiting to be milked, trapped in deadly confinement.
After extinguishing the fire at the West Texas dairy farm on Monday night, officials were baffled by the magnitude of the fatalities: 18,000 head of cattle perished in the blaze at the South Fork dairy farm near Dimmitt, Texas — or nearly three times the number of cattle led to slaughter in the US every day
A dairy farm worker who was rescued from the structure was taken to a hospital and was in a critical but stable condition on Tuesday. There were no other human casualties.
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“It’s mind-boggling,” Dimmitt Mayor Roger Malone said. “I don’t think it’s ever happened here before. It’s a real tragedy.’
It was the largest single death of livestock in the country since the Animal Welfare Institute, a Washington-based animal protection group, began tracking barn and farm fires in 2013.
That easily surpassed the previous high: a 2020 fire on a dairy farm in upstate New York that consumed about 400 cows, said Allie Granger, a policy officer at the institute.
The Texas fire “is the deadliest fire involving livestock that we know of,” she said. “In the past we’ve seen fires involving hundreds of cows at once, but nothing close to this fatality rate.”
Where was the cattle fire in Texas?
Castro County, the father of the fire, is open prairie land dotted with dairy farms and cattle ranches about 70 miles southwest of Amarillo.
Photos posted to social media by bystanders showed the large plume of black smoke billowing from the ranch fire, as well as charred cows being rescued from the structure.
What caused the dairy farm explosion?
A malfunction in a piece of farm equipment may have caused an explosion that led to the fire, said district judge Mandy Gfeller, the district’s top official. The Texas Fire Department is still investigating the cause, she said.
Malone, the mayor, said he was not aware of any other fires reported at the facility. He said the dairy opened in the area just over three years ago and employed 50 to 60 people.
The owners of South Fork Dairy could not be reached for comment.
How many cows died in the dairy fire?
Most of the animals killed — a mix of Holstein and Jersey cows — were in a large pen before being milked, she said. The 18,000 cows represented about 90% of the company’s total herd.
With each cow worth about $2,000, the company’s livestock losses could run into the tens of millions of dollars, Gfeller said. That does not include the loss of equipment and structure.
“You’re looking at a devastating loss,” she said. “My heart goes out to everyone involved in that operation.”
How did the Texan dairy perform compared to the rest of the country?
Texas ranks fourth nationally in milk production, home to 319 Grade A dairy farms with an estimated 625,000 cows producing nearly 16.5 billion pounds of milk annually, according to the Texas Association of Dairymen, a trade group.
And Castro County is the second-highest-producing county in Texas, with 15 dairies yielding 148,000 pounds of milk per month, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Even by Texas standards, South Fork Dairy was a behemoth. With 18,000 cattle, it was nearly 10 times larger than the average Texas dairy herd.
It’s not the first time large numbers of Texas cattle have died, but rarely do so many die from a single fire. According to the Texas Association of Dairymen, a snowstorm in December 2015 killed about 20,000 cattle in the Texas Panhandle.
And Hurricane Harvey drowned thousands more in Southeast Texas in 2017, leading to $93 million in livestock losses statewide, according to Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service.
What happens now?
State and dairy officials are turning to the huge, messy task of cleaning up 18,000 charred carcasses. On its website, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality lists several rules for on-site carcass burial, including burying the animal at least 50 feet from the nearest pit and recording GPS coordinates of the location. However, no mention is made of mass graves.
The Environmental Quality Commission and the AgriLife Extension Service are working together to assist with the cleanup, officials said.
Malone, the mayor of Dimmitt, said he has taken emergency management courses teaching him how to clean up animal carcasses after a disaster, but not on this scale.
“How do you dispose of 18,000 carcasses?” he said. “That’s something you don’t run into very often.”
Follow Jervis on Twitter: @MrRJervis.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 18,000 Cows Killed in Dimmitt, Texas Dairy Farm Fire: What You Need to Know
