DIMMITT, Texas — An explosion at a dairy farm in the Texas Panhandle that critically injured one person and killed an estimated 18,000 head of cattle is the deadliest barn fire recorded since the Animal Welfare Institute began tracking the fires. Just 11 miles southeast of Dimmitt, Texas, emergency crews responded to the fire at the South Fork Dairy farm on Monday.
According to USA Today, the person pulled from the fire was a dairy farm worker. Officials said the worker was flown to the UMC Hospital in Lubbock. Reports indicate their condition was critical, but it is now stable. All other employees were accounted for, and no one else was harmed in the fire.
A spokesperson for the state insurance department, which oversees the fire marshals’ office, said only that the fire is under investigation and referred questions to Rivera, who did not immediately return phone calls for comment Thursday.
Insurance department spokesperson Gardner Selby declined comment on the injured person's condition.
On social media, people near the area shared photos of the smoke-filled air and surviving burnt cows from the fire.
Castro County Sheriff Salvador Rivera has said the Monday fire and explosion at Southfork Dairy Farm near Dimmitt was likely caused by overheated equipment and would be investigated by state fire marshals.
South Fork Dairy opened for business three years ago. The amount of damage done could really set them back as there’s no telling how long it’d take to recover. The 18,000 cows lost to the fire are 90% of the farm’s livestock. Each cow is at around a value of $2,000, which could put the company’s loss at tens of millions of dollars, Gfeller said in a comment to USA Today.
Allie Granger, a policy associate with the Animal Welfare Institute, said to USA Today that the loss at South Fork is far greater than the 2020 fire that killed 400 cows at an upstate New York dairy farm.
The institute also tracks barn fires that kill other livestock, including poultry, pigs, goats and sheep.
“The deadliest barn fire overall since we began tracking in 2013 ... was a fire ... at Hi-Grade Egg Producers North, Manchester, Indiana, which killed 1 million chickens,” according to institute spokesperson Marjorie Fishman.
A 2022 report by the institute noted “several instances in which 100,000 to 400,000 chickens were killed in a single fire.”
Texas is the fourth in the nation for milk production. The state has “319 Grade A dairies with an estimated 625,000 cows produced almost 16.5 billion pounds of milk (more than 1.9 billion gallons) in 2022, up almost 6% from 2021,” according to the Texas Association of Dairymen. Castro County’s milk production is the second-highest in state.