They’d prefer to get to a point where safety practices are so standardized that there’s no need for grain bin rescues - and no need for their rescue equipment. On a whiteboard in the office is a list of 22 cases over the past decade in which the Ekdahls say people were successfully rescued by first responders using their equipment.īut the Ekdahls are frustrated. Rescuers practice removing them while others watch from walkways around the bin. Volunteers are buried waist-deep in a roofless grain bin. They regularly hold classes for firefighters and people who work for commercial grain elevators.
#CORN SILO RESCUE TUBE HOW TO#
On their farm near Erdahl, a half-hour south of Fergus Falls, Cindy and Dale Ekdahl built an indoor training facility to teach grain bin safety, and how to use the rescue equipment. Tim Walz proclaimed this week “Grain Bin Safety Week” to draw attention to the issue. Department of Agriculture and Minnesota Gov. In Minnesota, 114 of the 193 accidents the researchers have tracked since 1962 involved people getting caught in the grain itself. Grain bin accidents - which the researchers believe are under-reported by at least 30 percent - can include falls, asphyxiation from toxic fumes and getting caught in machinery. Minnesota is among the three states with the largest number of cases, along with Iowa and Indiana. Researchers at Purdue University have been tracking these accidents for decades. Grain can shift, trapping the person, and sometimes suffocating them.Īccording to the state Department of Agriculture, at least eight people died in grain bin accidents last year in Minnesota. When that happens, someone has to enter the bin and break up the chunks. Wet corn can create clumps that make it difficult to load the grain from the bin into trucks when it’s hauled to market. Grain that’s put in a bin while still wet is the most common cause of grain silo accidents, Ekdahl said. We have orders after orders after orders coming in now. The Ekdahls are hearing from fire departments concerned about all the wet corn brought in across the Midwest in the fall, when soggy fields and early snow forced a late harvest. He and his family have trained first responders from 22 states on how to conduct grain bin rescues. It worked - and Ekdahl now sells the equipment. The smooth metal shields create a barrier that allows rescuers to dig the person out and prevent the grain from covering them. He built a set of curved metal shields about six feet tall that could be inserted into the grain, forming a circle around the trapped person. Other grain bin rescue gear existed on the market, but Ekdahl worked with the firefighters to make what they considered to be a better system. After the 13-year-old’s death, a local fire department asked Dale Ekdahl, who had worked as a safety consultant, to build gear rescuers could use to help save someone trapped in the quicksand-like grain.
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