On July 19, Thanh Hoa Provincial Police and functional units continued to investigate a particularly serious accident at a pig farm of Dabaco Thanh Hoa Co., Ltd.
According to initial information, at about 5:30 pm on July 18, Mr. B.V. V - a worker at the farm - was repairing the electrical system in the area of the livestock waste tank when he was electrocuted and fell into the tank.
Discovering the incident, 6 people at the farm successively went down to rescue. However, these people later all showed signs of suffocation and could not escape on their own.
The victims were taken to the emergency room. By the morning of July 19, the accident had killed 5 people, injured 2 people, and are being treated.
The police agency has examined the scene and collected documents to determine the cause of the incident. Thanh Hoa Department of Agriculture and Environment also sent a working group to inspect related contents.
Dabaco Thanh Hoa high-tech pig breeding and commercial farm has been put into operation since the end of 2022, with an area of more than 50ha. According to the design, the farm has a scale of 5,600 sows and supplies more than 158,000 fattening pigs each year.
Previously, on October 7, 2024, Thanh Hoa Provincial People's Committee issued Decision No. 4000/QD-XPHC sanctioning Dabaco Thanh Hoa Co., Ltd. for violating regulations on environmental protection.
The inspection results determined that wastewater at the farm had a BOD5 index exceeding the technical standard by 1.48 times, in case the wastewater flow was from 600m3 to less than 800m3 per day. For this act, the enterprise was fined 170 million VND.
The COD index in wastewater exceeds the standard by 1.05 times, the enterprise is sanctioned with a warning.
The company was also fined 40 million VND for failing to develop a plan to prevent and respond to waste incidents and an environmental recovery plan after the waste incident.
The total amount that Dabaco Thanh Hoa Co., Ltd. must pay and pay is more than 216.5 million VND. Of which, 210 million VND is the fine paid to the state budget and more than 6.5 million VND is the cost of environmental sample analysis.
The inspection was carried out after the incident of rainwater from the mountain overflowing through the treated wastewater storage lake of centralized wastewater treatment station No. 1 into the environment.
Before being fined, people in the residential area of Thach Quang Farm and Quang Trung village repeatedly reflected that the stench from livestock farms in the area affected their lives. On the evening of August 8 and 9, 2024, many people gathered in front of the Dabaco farm gate, requesting businesses to take measures to handle the stench situation.
Over the past time, in Thanh Hoa, many pig farms have also been found to violate environmental regulations, including the situation of degraded wastewater treatment systems, operating at incorrect capacity, discharging untreated waste and operating in violation of environmental permits.
After the accident that killed 5 people at Dabaco farm, in addition to investigating the cause, functional agencies need to review electrical safety conditions, working procedures at waste storage tanks, air measuring equipment, ventilation and rescue plans at large-scale livestock farms.
Public data from the Department of Agriculture and Environment shows that Thanh Hoa has a list of 532 pig farms according to data from June 2025, updated to the system in January 2026. The total pig herd of the whole province at the end of 2025 is about 1.2 million heads.
