A freak lightning strike is being blamed for a fire that swept through a barn at a racehorse training facility near Lexington, Kentucky, killing 23 horses.

Eric Reed, owner of the Mercury Equine Center, said in the early hours of Dec. 18, a night watchman saw flames coming from the roof of a barn containing 36 mostly yearling Thoroughbreds. After calling emergency fire personnel, Reed and his staff began evacuating horses out of the barn to a large paddock outside the fire zone.

“By the time we got to there, the front part of the barn was engulfed in flames, so we started getting horses that were closest to the fire out as quickly as we could,” Reed said. “Then we worked toward the back of the building.”

Reed and a staff member brought 13 horses out of the fire before the barn’s roof collapsed. In all, 18 yearlings and five horses of racing age were lost in the blaze