An explosion at a Texas dairy farm killed roughly 18,000 cattle, in what is likely the largest mass death of cattle ever.
One farm worker was critically injured as well. The Monday disaster at the Southfork Dairy Farm in Dimmitt, Texas, is on a scale unlike any farm disaster seen before, according to the Animal Welfare Institute.
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"The Animal Welfare Institute has been tracking barn fires going back to 2013," Policy Associate Allie Granger of the AWI told the Washington Examiner. "This is the deadliest barn fire or fire on a farming facility involving cattle that we are aware of. ... In the past, we've seen that this has been a huge issue, particularly for the poultry industry. So when we have such high mortality, that's usually in chicken fires. So we've seen incidents involving hundreds of thousands of animals in those cases, but in terms of fires involving cattle in the past, we've seen there's been incidents involving several hundred, but nothing even close to the scale that we're seeing down in Texas."
The severity of the fire has brought media coverage to a phenomenon that is all too common, although on what is usually a much smaller scale. The AWI has documented 6.5 million farm animal deaths due to fires since 2013, with perhaps the majority of these being chickens. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the cause of the inferno isn't given. In the majority of cases where the cause is given, heating devices are usually to blame.
Granger said that in Monday's case, the cause looks to be an electrical malfunction or due to faulty equipment.
Castro County Sheriff Sal Rivera told the local outlet KSAT that the cause was likely a combination of factors that led to a build-up of gases that overheated.
"The speculation was probably what they call a honey badger, which is a vacuum that sucks the manure and water out, and possibly that it got overheated and probably the methane and things like that ignited and spread out and exploded and the fire," he said.
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Granger urged an industry-wide adoption of a number of safety codes to prevent such tragedies from occurring in the future, specifically the NFPA 150, the Fire and Life Safety in Animal Housing Facilities Code.
"That code outlines a number of practices that these sorts of operations can take in order to better protect animals. [It] includes things like performing animal inspections alongside fire departments or fire experts, having emergency action plans in place, implementing fire safety training for employees. So that those are the sorts of things on the operational level in terms of structural and infrastructure improvements. You know, making sure that buildings are set adequately apart so that if there is a fire in one facility or one building, it doesn't spread to another building, having adequate access to fire lanes, things of that sort."