Massive Semen Explosion Puts Australian Firefighters In A Sticky Situation

(Newsweek) – A huge fire at a cattle breeding facility in Australia has caused thousands of dollars in damage after at least 100 cylinders containing bull semen were destroyed.

Emergency services were called to the blaze in the early hours at Yarram Herd Services in Gippsland, Victoria.

According to ABC, it took 10 fire crews more than two hours to fully extinguish the fire after it broke out around 3 a.m. local time. A spokesman from the Country Fire Authority told Daily Mail Australia that the fire had “completely shredded the building.”

Country Fire Authority Gippsland commander Chris Loeschenkohl said the crew had to be wary of “projectiles” coming at them while they tackled the blaze.

“The liquid inside the cylinders was rapidly expanding and essentially the lids of the cryogenic cylinders were just popping off the top and projectiles were being thrown from the building,” he told ABC. “So firefighters went into a defensive mode initially to protect themselves, because there were also LPG cylinders at the neighboring property, and they did a magnificent job.”

I really just wanted to write that headline. There needs to be more words here, but let’s be honest: I’m incapable of writing anything funnier than the truth here. Tens of thousands of dollars of bull semen going up in flames and exploding all over a bunch of Aussie firefighters just trying to do their job feels like the worst day of work potentially in history. Also I understand there’s clearly a market for it, but owning hundreds of cylinders of bull semen feels like a red flag. I get it, folks need to make a living, do whatever it takes to pay the bills. But what path leads one to this life? How does someone get into the semen cylinder engineering game? And why haven’t they constructed flame retardant semen cylinders yet? Just a real mess of a story from top to bottom that raises more questions than answers.