FORT WORTH, Texas — The sound of horses in distress could be heard Wednesday up and down Atkins Street in south Fort Worth. The horses were burned and shaken after surviving a fire that other horses did not.
"How? How does this happen?" asked Marisol Herera, whose family owns the horses.
Early Wednesday morning, in the rural part of town just south of downtown, a Galveston-bound Union Pacific train carrying ethanol derailed and caught fire.
"We do have an evacuation zone that we are working right now," Fort Worth firefighter Mike Drivdahl said.
Herera's family stable was in that evacuation zone, but it was too late. Train cars toppled into their property and the stable caught fire with 10 horses inside. Three of those horses didn't escape.
"Destroyed, everything destroyed," Herera said. She says it took her father years to build the stable by hand, and they love their horses like family.
"You still see the smoke, and we had all the horse stables here and everything gone. It's just to the ground," she said.
A Union Pacific spokeswoman told WFAA they plan to work with the family to address their loss. The company still isn't sure what caused the 25-car derailment, but will take everything into consideration, including the storms that rolled through overnight.
Then, while firefighters were working the fire, their mobile command unit caught fire. They say they aren't sure yet how it happened, but it was unrelated to the train derailment. The unit was purchased in 2008, the department says, and will cost $1.25 million to replace.
"I just came and they turned us away," said Margarita Mauricio, who drove to the area to see if her own horses were okay. "They said there were fumes in the area and they were having people evacuated."
The evacuations were not mandatory – just a precaution as burning ethanol can cause dizziness and nausea.
But for the Herera family, it caused so much pain. Animal lives were lost and a beloved stable that was at the center of their family life is now gone.