Tens of thousands of chickens died on Monday afternoon in the barn fire in Asten-Heusden. And that’s not the first time things have gone wrong in the village. Three and a half years ago, it was already a hit less than a kilometer away. Then four thousand pigs died in the fire. It led to a lot of outrage at the time, but much does not seem to have changed. An overview of the largest barn fires in recent years.
2018 – Asten-Heusden (4000 dead pigs)
The fire in 2018 caused a lot of anger and sadness. Especially since 26,000 chickens had already died in Willemstad earlier that year. Shortly afterwards, interest group ZLTO sent a plan to the House of Representatives to drastically reduce the number of barn fires, but rapid action from The Hague was not forthcoming.
In fact, it could have gone much worse. Four thousand pigs and eight hundred piglets from two adjacent stables could be rescued in time.
2019 – Bulrush mortar (almost 3000 dead pigs)
Three of the four stables on a farm in Biezenmortel were completely destroyed. That while the fire did not start there, but in the tool shed. Yet the fire moved very quickly, through the air washing installation. These pipes are intended to clean the air full of ammonia and other pollutants, but also ensure that fire spreads throughout an entire building in a very short time.
Shortly after the fire, the farm was defaced by animal activists with the text ‘burn in hell’. To prevent further threats, a temporary neighborhood watch was even set up to guard the farm day and night.
2019 – Asten (500 piglets)
A barn measuring twenty by fifty meters burned out completely within an hour. Here too, the fire spread rapidly through the ventilation ducts of the air washing system. The dead piglets were not intended for slaughter, they would later be used as breeding pigs.
2020 – Dongen (pair of goats)
Things went wrong in a large stable of a goat farm in early 2020 when a mountain of hay bales caught fire. The flames quickly spread to the roof, which soon caught fire. The good news: almost all fourteen hundred goats in the barn were evacuated in time. Almost all of them, because a few animals died in the fire anyway.
2020 – Lierop (1000 pigs)
About a thousand pigs did not survive when, for unknown reasons, a fire broke out in their stable in Lierop. According to the agitated pig farmer, the animals probably suffocated in their sleep after the extraction system stopped due to a power failure. Here too, there were security guards in the yard after the fire, to prevent angry activists from entering.
Brabant leader
A total of 72 barn fires took place in our province between 2012 and 2021. This was revealed in a report by the Dutch Safety Board. This makes Brabant the frontrunner. Across the Netherlands, 328 cattle sheds caught fire during that period. Nearly 1.3 million animals were killed.
Animal organizations have raised the alarm more often in recent years about the fire safety of the increasingly larger stables. In their opinion, too little has changed.
Nevertheless, Agriculture Minister Henk Staghouwer still had good news of last week. In a letter to the House of Representatives, he wrote that the number of barn fires had fallen to 35 in 2021, compared to 54 a year earlier.