18,000 cattle dead, 1 person injured after Texas dairy farm explosion

According to a report from USA Today, the fire spread quickly through the holding pens where cows were waiting to be milked. When authorities arrived they found one woman trapped inside, and they airlifted her to UMC Hospital in Lubbock, where she is in stable condition. No one else was harmed in the fire.

Dimmitt Mayor Roger Malone said, “I don't think it’s ever happened before around here, It’s a real tragedy.”

According to County Judge Mandy Gfeller, each cow cost around $2,000 each and make up about 90 percent of the farm's herd, so the damage could reach tens of millions of dollars. Of the incident she said, “you're looking at a devastating loss” and “my heart goes out to each person involved in the operation.

The Animal Welfare Institute said this is the most deaths of livestock from a single incident since they started keeping the statistics in 2013. The previous high was 400 at a farm in upstate New York in 2020. Spokeswoman Allie Granger said “In the past, we have seen fires involving several hundred cows at a time, but nothing anything near this level of mortality."

While investigators are still trying to determine the cause of the fire, Castro County Sheriff Sal Rivera speculated that it “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."

It is reported that South Forks Dairy Farm was a massive operation comparatively. The 18,000 cattle that were killed is almost 10 times larger than the average farm in Texas.

Officials said that the environmental quality commission and AgriLife Extension Service are working together to help with the cleanup.