Ever heard of Explosion of Cylinders containing Bull Semen?
Explosions happen all the time, cylinder blasts do happen often. You get to hear in the news about such incidents on a regular basis. There is nothing weird in that because most of the time it is related to the usual items like explosives, kerosene, or any other inflammable substance; and the usual trade commodities are burned away.
But if the trade commodity is Bull Semen, then it’s surely a weird thing to hear about; and such an incident happened in Gippsland, Australia. The blaze happened at Yarram Herd Services on a Tuesday morning. About 100 cryogenic cylinders exploded in the fire and splattered the building with quality bull sperms that were stored for insemination!
Now don’t start getting weird imaginations of how actually the scene would be looking like. The nearby cattle breeding farm is really hurting for their loss. The company Yarram Herd Services offer breeding advice to farmers and artificial insemination for their cattle, even they suffered big losses in the fire. The Bull semen was of all the local farmers in their vicinity.
You might be thinking now what value could semen have? But see these numbers for yourself: Each cylinder cost between $500 to $1000, depending on their size. Semen was stored in straws in these cylinders and each cylinder contained many straws. Each straw of semen was valued between $5 to $95! So now you can imagine the total financial loss for 100 cylinders getting blasted in the fire.
The Artificial Insemination season was just about to begin and hence the storage of bull semen was to the maximum capacity. A local journalist, Bonnie Barkmeyer reported that the cause of the fire was still under investigation.
It wasn’t easy for the firefighters to put out the fire because the lids of the cryogenic cylinders were just popping out because of the excess heat and the projectiles were flying dangerously in all directions in the building (maybe even the Bull semen was being thrown out randomly).
You should understand the plight of the firefighters if they didn’t want to enter the building at that time. What if all the bull semen got smeared on the face of a poor firefighter? Certainly, it will haunt him for the rest of his life. Besides this, they faced many other obstacles and hence it took about two hours to bring the fire under control.
Thankfully, no humans were lost or injured in the incident. But our hearts should go out to the people who suffered losses, the company, and the farmers; and also the poor bulls who probably, might be expecting their next generation? But whose precious semen got wasted. Just imagine the huge amount of cleanup process needed after the blast! Poor workers at the cattle breeding farm themselves were forced to clean up all the semen mess.
Article Reference: https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/yarram-herd-service-bull-sperm-fire_n_5d811981e4b077dcbd655ab3.
Image Reference: https://www.farmonline.com.au/story/6391982/cattle-semen-destroyed-in-yarram-factory-fire/.
