A wind-fueled fire swept through a central Ohio pig farm on Wednesday, killing about 6,000 hogs that were trapped in the barn complex.
Workers at Fine Oak Farms in London, Ohio, about 30 miles west of the state capital, Columbus, told investigators that the disaster began when a refrigerator in a break room caught fire, said Brian Bennington, the chief of the Central Townships Joint Fire District.
The cause of the fire is still being investigated, he said.
The farm, which can house up to 20,000 hogs, is a complex of five low-slung buildings that are lined with a series of large fans that keep the barns well ventilated. The fans are necessary to keep pigs cool in the summer heat because the animals do not sweat.
But while the vents allow air to escape, they also allow air to enter, and on Wednesday, when there were sustained winds of 20 miles per hour with gusts up to 35 m.p.h., the fire quickly accelerated, overwhelming the workers and whipping through the barns, which are connected by corridors, Mr. Bennington said.
“The wind pushed the fire through, which made it very difficult to exhaust,” he said, adding that three barns were destroyed.
As three fire units from the Central Townships Joint Fire District responded, a call went out for reinforcements as an enormous black cloud of smoke became visible. Ten tanker trucks delivered the 250,000 gallons of water that were required to quell the fire, a task that took more than four hours, Mr. Bennington said, because of the fierce wind and the limited water supply.
Other than the dead hogs, who Mr. Bennington said were still underneath the wreckage, there were no injuries to workers or fire fighters.
Another barn caught fire on Saturday in Madison County, which includes London, but Mr. Bennington said that was from a lightning strike. Mr. Bennington said the buildings at Fine Oak Farms were up to code.
This was the third major fire at an Ohio hog farm in recent years, all of which occurred in the agricultural region west of Columbus. In 2024, about 1,100 hogs were killed in a barn fire at Brandt Swine Farms in Versailles, and in 2022, about 2,000 hogs were killed in a barn fire at Kenneth Scholl Hog Farm in Brown Township.
More than 2.5 million farm animals died in barn fires from 2022 to 2024, according to a report last year by the Animal Welfare Institute, which tracks the industry. The vast majority of deaths, more than 96 percent, occurred at chicken farms. But there have been outliers: In 2023, a fire ripped through a Texas dairy farm, killing 18,000 cows.
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