Nearly 20,000 cows are believed to have been killed in an explosion and fire at a Texas dairy farm

• A massive fire and explosion erupted at a Texas dairy farm this week, according to authorities
• The fiery blast killed more than 18,000 cows at South Fork Dairy Farms in the Texas city of Dimmitt.

Nearly 20,000 cows were killed and one person was injured in a massive explosion and fire at a Texas dairy farm this week, making it the deadliest inferno disaster for cattle in the United States in the last decade.

The fiery blast erupted at South Fork Dairy Farms in the Texas city of Dimmitt on Monday night, according to authorities. Photos released by the Castro County Sheriff's Office showed huge plumes of smoke billowing from the facility during the disaster.

Only a small percentage of the cows at the farm survived the tragedy, according to local news outlet KFDA, which reported that more than 18,000 cattle perished.

"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 of the animals, KFDA reported.

The Animal Welfare Institute told Insider that the blaze was the deadliest barn fire for cattle in the country and the deadliest barn fire in Texas since the non-profit organization started tracking barn fires in 2013.

Hundreds of thousands of farm animals are killed every year as a result of barn fires and since 2013 more than 6.4 million animals — most of which were chickens — have perished in barn blazes, according to the organization.

The organization said that the "devastating numbers, which likely do not even represent the full scale of the problem, serve as an urgent reminder to the industry to prioritize fire safety and prevention on farms."

"We hope the industry will remain focused on this issue and strongly encourage farms to adopt commonsense fire safety measures," said Allie Granger, policy associate for AWI's farm animal program. "It is hard to imagine anything worse than being burned alive."

The cause of the Monday's inferno remains under investigation, but Rivera told the KIAH news outlet that the initial explosion could have been caused by a machinery malfunction.

The explosion erupted, causing a fire which then spread to a building on the property used to hold the cattle, Rivera said, citing witnesses, according to the report.

First responders at the scene discovered a worker trapped inside the facility and fire crews were able to rescue that person, who was ultimately hospitalized, the Castro County Sheriff's Office said.

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