Around 6,000 pigs died in a huge fire on Wednesday at a farm outside Columbus, Ohio.
The blaze at Fine Oak Farms in London began when a refrigerator in an employee break room caught fire, and it spread quickly through barns housing the facility’s hogs, thanks to high winds pushing the blaze through air vents normally used to keep the pigs cool.
“Firefighters faced extremely challenging conditions throughout the incident. Sustained winds of approximately 20 miles per hour, with gusts reaching up to 35 miles per hour, significantly accelerated fire spread and complicated suppression efforts,” the City of London Fire Department wrote on Wednesday in a statement on Facebook. “These high winds made it extremely difficult to contain forward fire progression and created rapidly changing fire behavior conditions across the large agricultural complex.”
Photos of the emergency response showed numerous fire engines converging on the farm, as a column of smoke rose into the sky.
No one was injured in the blaze, which began around 11:56 a.m., and rescuers saved about 1,500 pigs.
“I was devastated because when I came down [the road] and saw the two barns on the ground, I was crying on the phone with my mom,” Stephanie Ramey, whose husband and son work at the farm, told ABC6.
It took about 250,000 gallons of water and more than four hours to fight the blaze, according to officials.
The farm’s rural location meant water had to be trucked in to fight the fire, NBC4 reports.
The Ohio State Fire Marshal’s Office is investigating the incident.
Animal advocates said that the increasing size of livestock farms raises the risk of high-fatality events like the fire in Ohio.
“The big issue is these large operations that house these incredibly large numbers of animals,” Allie Granger, a policy adviser for the farmed animal program at Animal Welfare Institute, told The New York Times. “Fatalities are driven by the fires that happen at these large industrial complexes.”
Pork production has nearly tripled in Ohio in the last two decades, while the number of farms has declined.
It’s not the first major conflagration to hit the state’s pork industry in recent years. A 2024 barn fire in Versailles killed 1,100 animals, while a 2022 blaze killed 2,000 in Brown Township.
