A street in Argentina was likened to a ‘sea of blood’ after a slaughterhouse storage tank burst open and its contents flowed through the city.

The incident took place at a slaughterhouse owned by Ganadera San Roque in the city of Morón, in the eastern Argentine province of Buenos Aires.

The storage tank at the slaughterhouse is said to have been filled with 500,000 litres of animal blood.

Advert

Streets covered in blood after slaughterhouse incident Newsflash/@EmilianoCatena

On Monday afternoon, March 9, the tank fell and burst open. It’s unclear whether the tank collapsed inside the slaughterhouse, or if it was being transported at the time of the incident.

Horrifying images and video footage shows roads coated with the thick, red liquid, which reportedly flooded the whole block and left a sickly stench hovering throughout the city.

In video recorded at the scene, an unidentified man says (translated):

Advert

The whole block is full of blood, there is going to be a mess. It goes up to the corner, everybody is taking pictures.

Streets covered in blood after slaughterhouse incident Newsflash/@EmilianoCatena

Residents reported hearing a bang at approximately 3.00pm, before blood started filling the streets.

Local Marisa Camejo expressed her grievances about the state of the city after the incident, saying she’d had enough of the ‘smell… rats that look like cats, heavy traffic all the year, and nasty noises from lorries and cows.’

Advert

She added:

It was a sea of blood, it was very disgusting.

Firefighters told reporters they had cleaned the mess and claimed ‘everything is sorted now’, but locals have argued there is still some blood in the streets, causing the foul stench to linger.

Streets covered in blood after slaughterhouse incident Newsflash/@EmilianoCatena

Advert

The slaughterhouse has not commented on the case or revealed how or why the tank burst open. Residents in the area claim they have asked for the company to be shut down several times, to no avail.

According to The Earth Awards, blood collected by slaughterhouses is stored as it can be used to create a variety of products, including ‘blood meal’, a kind of animal fodder which doubles as an ingredient for plant fertiliser, as well as black pudding and even medical products.

The blood is stored in tanks for a short while before specialised facilities and treatment plants come to take it away for processing.