18,000 cows killed in Texas dairy farm explosion

Around 18,000 cows are thought to have died in an explosion and fire at a dairy farm in west Texas in which one person was seriously injured.

All employees survived, the Castro County sheriff Salvador Rivera told CNN, but a woman who had been trapped inside the burning farm was flown to hospital in Lubbock and remained in intensive care. Her identity has not been disclosed.

“This is a devastating loss that will impact many,” Mandy Gfeller, a local judge, told the broadcaster.

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The cause is still being investigated, although Gfeller suggested that a farm equipment malfunction could be to blame.

The 911 calls on Monday evening came “in rapid succession”, said The New York Times, with responders seeing a “thick plume of smoke, mushrooming over the plains”.

The fire “spread quickly through the holding pens”, where thousands of cows waiting to be milked were “trapped in deadly confines”, said USA Today. Pictures on social media also showed charred cows that had been saved.

The number of cows killed, although still an estimate, is roughly 90% of the farm’s herd, and is equal to about 20% of the cattle slaughtered in America every day.

“It’s mind-boggling,” the mayor of the nearby town of Dimmitt, Roger Malone, said.

Each cow is valued at about $2,000, so the farm’s losses could amount to tens of millions of dollars, Gfeller said, without including the loss of equipment and buildings.

It is “the deadliest barn fire for cattle in Texas history”, Sid Miller, the Texas agricultural commissioner, said in a statement.

According to data from the Animal Welfare Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit organisation that tracks barn fires, it is also the largest mass death of cattle in a US fire.

Since 2013, more than six million animals have been killed in barn fires, often due to electrical faults. The vast majority of the deaths were chickens, with cattle accounting for less than 1%.