Rescuers save man partially buried in grain

“It was a very, very good outcome.”

That was Claremont Fire Chief Casey Dahl’s reaction to his department’s successful rescue of a man who was trapped in a grain bin last week.

The call came in at 10:40 a.m. Feb. 26, sending responders to CHS/Greenway at 135 W. Front St. in Claremont.

There, a 60-year-old man was “just … stuck,” Dahl said.

“He was sucked in, up to right above his stomach,” Dahl said. “He was able to communicate with us the whole time.”

The man was in a 250,000-bushel bin at CHS, which was about a quarter full of soybeans.

In a matter of providence, the agribusiness cooperative had supplied the necessary equipment for a successful rescue.

“Our grain tube was actually purchased by CHS many years ago,” Dahl said. “We were one of the first departments in the county to get a grain tube.”

On average, nearly two dozen people are killed each year in the U.S. in grain entrapment incidents.

Flowing grain is dangerous and behaves much like quicksand.

In four seconds, a full-grown adult can sink knee-deep from the suction of flowing grain; in 20 seconds, they can be completely buried.

But the pressure of the grain prevents self-escape. A person buried to the waist in grain requires a force equivalent to their own body weight — plus 600 pounds — to free them.

That’s where the grain rescue tube comes in.

It’s just what it sounds like: a tube that can be lowered into grain, reducing the pressure of the grain on the victim.

It is made of interlocking panels that can be placed around the trapped party one at a time, until a coffer dam is built.

If the tube has a ladder built in, the victim may be able to climb out; otherwise, the rescuers are able to remove the grain surrounding the victim without more collapsing onto the person trapped.

Several members of the Claremont Fire Department have received the necessary training from Jack Volz, of Safety and Security Consultation Specialists.

“The people who went in (the bin) have been through the training, so we knew what we were doing,” Dahl said.

Still, Dahl requested mutual aid from the Dodge Center Fire Department before arriving at the scene.

“We don’t have a lot of firefighters in town during the day,” Dahl said. “If I’d have seen that it was worse, or there was going to be more that we were dealing with,” he would have also contacted Volz.

“Where the guy was, we had to do a horseshoe layout” of the rescue tube, Dahl said. “With the amount of beans that were in there, we had a bunch of plywood that could have blocked it.”

The trapped employee was following safety requirements, wearing a safety line and harness.

In another relevant twist, Dahl used to work at the Claremont CHS location.

“When I heard the page, I knew exactly what they were doing and where we were going,” he said of the initial call.

“The company did everything they should have,” he said. “When we got there, the company was very calm, they had everything moved out of our way so we could get up there, and had gotten as much grain out of the door as they could so we could get in the door easier.”

Meanwhile, the man was “staying calm; wasn’t trying to work his way out, which just makes more grain fall around him,” Dahl said.

He was freed within an hour of rescuers’ arrival.

“They did take him for evaluation,” Dahl said of the employee. “He wanted to walk to the ambulance, and we were like, ‘no, protocol says we can’t let you get up and walk right away,’ so he went into the ambulance on a backboard.”

In addition to 11 members of CFD, 15 firefighters from Dodge Center were on the scene. Also responding were crews from the Dodge Center Ambulance and Dodge County Sheriff’s Office.

“The last one we were on together, it wasn’t a good outcome,” Dahl said. “We all worked together really well and managed to get him out quickly.”