In a massive dairy farm fire on Monday, over 18,000 cattle were killed and one worker was injured, according to authorities. Only a small percentage of the cattle at the South Fork Dairy survived the tragedy.
“There’s some that survived, there’s some that are probably injured to the point where they’ll have to be destroyed,” Castro County Sheriff Sal Rivera said regarding the fatalities. “The magnitude of the fire and the amount of people that were here, we were very fortunate that it was less than what we had. We had just one injured it could have been a lot worse.”
The lone injured person was trapped in the facility but luckily was saved by fire crews and airlifted to a Lubbock hospital approximately 80 miles away.
The initial explosion happened around 7:30 in the morning and may have been caused by a machinery malfunction, Rivera said.
The Animal Welfare Institute estimated that this fire is the deadliest barn fire in Texas and the deadliest involving cattle since at least 2013.
South Fork Dairy has around 60 employees and has been open for less than a full year. It’s the first reported fire or explosion at the business that helps make Texas one of the nation’s top milk-producing states.
