A Life or Death Decision: The Need for Innovation

by Bo McDonald

Picture a small quaint white house, surrounded by fields of grain as far as the eye can see. Out back there’s a red barn and several small grain silos. It seems harmless enough, right? Wrong. Those small grain silos are a death trap. In fact, working conditions in much of the agriculture industry rarely capture national attention.

NPR recently reported on a study by the Center for Public Integrity that found there have been at least 179 deaths at commercial farm storage facilities since 1984. A number of other people died in silos on family farms. In many cases, workers suffocated to death like 14-year-old Wyatt Whitebread of Mount Carroll, Ill, who was buried in corn in the silo.

A majority of deaths happen when workers get into the grain silo to “walk down the grain”. That practice helps loosen grain and corn kernels that stick and keep the rest of the grain from flowing through the silo.

“It’s just like being shrink-wrapped and it’s constantly pushing against you like quicksand” said Dave Newcomb, a safety instructor with the Illinois Fire Institute. “If you’re trapped in grain up to the waist, it takes over 600 pounds of force plus your body weight to free you from the grain.”

These types of rescue missions are not easy. Just as quickly as you can pull the grain away from the entrapped person it fills right back up again. And because it takes so much force to pull someone from the grain, the victims often suffer broken bones or are killed in the rescue.

continue reading »