Texas dairy farm blaze leaves 20K cattle dead, one worker injured

More than 18,000 cattle were killed and one worker was injured in a massive fire that was set off by an explosion at a Texas dairy farm Monday, according to authorities.

Only a small percentage of the cattle at South Fork Dairy survived the tragedy, officials told KFDA.

“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 this week.

The injured person was trapped in the facility but was saved by fire crews and airlifted to a Lubbock hospital that is about 80 miles away from the Dimmitt business, the sheriff’s office said, according to KAMR.

“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,” said Rivera, according to KVII. “We had just one injured it could have been a lot worse.”

The Animal Welfare Institute estimated the incident is the deadliest barn fire in Texas and deadliest involving cattle since the organization started tracking the fires in 2013, KFDA reported.

A giant plume of dark smoke could be seen from the farm, according to images and video posted on social media.

The initial explosion happened around 7:30 a.m. and might have been caused by a machinery malfunction, Rivera said, according to KAMR.

South Fork Dairy reportedly has about 60 employees and has been open for less than a year. It’s the first reported fire or explosion at the business that helps make Texas one of the top milk producers in the nation.