June 12, 2020
"A 56-year-old North Dakota [woman] drowned in a giant vat of sunflower seeds when she lost her footing and was sucked inside the grain bin..."
"The woman was wearing a harness, but it was not attached at the time of the accident and she plunged inside the massive container...." (NY Post).
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47 comments:
You hear about that happening from time to time, often with kids. I can't imagine not wearing the harness, but I guess you can get used to anything after a while and stop focusing on the danger.
I blame baseball for the shameful glut of sunflower seeds that took this poor woman's life.
Well, asphyxiated, not "drowned." But yeah. This happens to people all over the farm belt. Going into a full grain storage unit is risky.
My wife, whose Dad ran a grain elevator, tells me that flax seeds are the most slippery and dangerous.
This happens in corn bins too.
And recall the great scene in "Witness" where Harrison Ford suffocates bad cops from Philly in a grain chute in a dairy barn.
I wonder if they throw out the whole siloful of seeds when a woman dies in it.
I wonder if they throw out the whole siloful of seeds when a woman dies in it.
It like the FDA allowable amount of frog parts per unit of wine. It's not zero...
Ann Althouse said...
I wonder if they throw out the whole siloful of seeds when a woman dies in it.
Nope. (Background: I grew up on a farm in North Dakota. My brother operates that farm now, and I have many relatives and friends who are farmers.)
You need denser seeds to that you'd float in them instead of sinking.
Suffocated or crushed- not drowned. Her lungs aren't full of sunflower seeds.
Roy,
What part of ND? My mom grew up on a ND farm in the SE corner
Farming is a pretty dangerous occupation.
Whataya gotta be in there for?
Every day I read the North Dakota newspapers of 100 years ago (to the day) thanks to the Library of Congress "Chronicling America" website. The number of deaths by accident is astonishing: People get kicked in the head by horses, wagons and autos overturn on sharp curves, steam-powered machinery blows up, entire towns burn down, people slip and fall in front of trains, and lumber mills are especially deadly. (Although the 20s seem safer than the oughts and teens, the Great War and Spanish Influenza aside.)
Not much that way 100 years ago in The Bismarck Tribune, though. Harding emerges as front runner for GOP nomination. And the locked-door murder mystery of Joseph Elwell, noted whist player and philanderer, is worth the front page. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85042243/1920-06-12/ed-1/seq-1/
Anyway, farm country remains dangerous, but progress continues.
“I fell into a vat of chocolate....”
— “Chocolate” by the Smothers Brothers
On the plus side she suffered a more dignified and honorable death than David Carradine. If only David had had a safety harness while pursuing his hobby, he would be alive today. More people, I'm certain, die from auto asphyxiation accidents than from sunflower vat mishaps and yet no effort is made to design safeguards for this activity. Perhaps the Carradine family could establish a charitable foundation to research and develop a safety harness for this activity. What does it say about the Puritanism of American life that we have safety harnesses for sunflower vats but not for auto erotic asphyxiation activities?
That 911: Austin show featured a corn-bin near-drowning, but "our heroes" were able to save everyone. If the writers did their research, then the stats on how much the seed weighs and how it behaves are rather amazing.
On the plus side she suffered a more dignified and honorable death than David Carradine. If only David had had a safety harness while pursuing his hobby, he would be alive today. More people, I'm certain, die from auto asphyxiation accidents than from sunflower vat mishaps and yet no effort is made to design safeguards for this activity. Perhaps the Carradine family could establish a charitable foundation to research and develop a safety harness for this activity. What does it say about the Puritanism of American life that we have safety harnesses for sunflower vats but not for auto erotic asphyxiation activities?
My great grandfather’s much younger sister was killed as a child in a grain silo accident. I think the rough gist is she was playing in it and got smothered when it was filled.
I'm too lazy to look up the stats, death in grain bin asphyxiation are probably in the range of 10 per year in Iowa. That would be corn and soybeans. Corn and soy are 56 and 60 lbs per bushel respectively. I did look up Sunflower, and that is 25 lbs, Oats is 32 lbs. That just means that a person would sink further into sunflower than corn. TW is not the only variable. Angle of repose also factors in, which is a measure of "slipperiness"
A victim that dies in such an accident would be recovered from the top. a 2 or 3 person crew would go in with harnesses and tube damns designed to stop flow and stablize the grain. Then a harness would be placed on the victim and taken out the top.
A rescue to save a trapped person could be done be getting a line on the victim and cutting a hole in the side of the bin to drain the grain out. This assumes the person has no harness already on, and is is too deep to attempt to pull out of the grain. The engulfed portion being to large and injury would result in applying enough force to free them.
Have you and Meade seen fields of Sunflowers? A very stunning sight to see an 80 acre field of sunflowers in full head. Heads following the sun across the sky. I have never seen any in Iowa, only MN and WS. Must be a yield to land, price equation. And production facility availability.
exhelodrvr1 said...
Roy,
What part of ND? My mom grew up on a ND farm in the SE corner
Steele County. About an hour-and-a-half northwest of Fargo.
rehajm said...
Whataya gotta be in there for?
There are a few possibilities:
- The bin or silo was being emptied, and something was obstructing the flow. (That's one of the most dangerous times to go in, because the grain can collapse without warning.)
- The bin or silo was being filled and it needed to be leveled out.
- Collecting samples for testing.
Probably others I can't think of offhand.
Why is a death of someone who failed to use the available safety device news?
People do stupid, and dangerous, things all the time.
Likely because to the NY Post audience falling into a vat of seeds is inconceivable.
I wonder if they throw out the whole siloful of seeds when a woman dies in it.
I have heard that people often loosen their bowels when they die.
Hmmm. These seeds taste funky.
Speaking of how dangerous farming is, there is an interesting case out of Pender, Nebraska. Pender is 90 miles north of Omaha.
Guy is farming by himself and he gets his foot caught in an auger. The auger ground up his foot and the auger was still running. He takes out a pocket knife and cuts off the tendons and whatever is remaining so he can extract himself from the auger. He then crawls to the barn and calls his son to sent the squad out to the farm.
One of my old girlfriends went to school with this guy. Said he was tough back in school.
"I wonder if they throw out the whole siloful of seeds when a woman dies in it."
I was thinking the same question as I was reading. Probably not. I am sure the seeds face further cleaning and processing once taken out of silo storage.
Sunflower Seed Executions are not considered cruel and unusual in the Plains States. The problem would be The Guards eating the seeds between executions.
I wonder if they throw out the whole siloful of seeds when a woman dies in it.
Would the woman's remains be any more or less onerous than the dead rodents within the bin? Processing cleans things up nicely.
iowan2, I have long thought that "angle of repose" is the most pleasant of all names for a scientific constant. The four colligative properties don't even come close.
When I was a young boy, I helped bring in the oats at harvest time. Being the smallest of the crew, my job was to go into the oats bin that was being filled by an elevator and keep shoveling the oats level. I didn't worry about suffocating, but the heat from the freshly harvested oats made me sweat profusely. There was no breeze at all to cool me off and the unremitting fine dust made my nose run without stopping. Neither OSHA nor the FDA would approve, I imagine.
Some day soon, you'll be watching a baseball game on tv. The camera will turn to the dugout where 15 or so guys are simultaneously spitting out sunflower seeds. The manager will be seen with a weird look on his face as he pulls a shoelace aglet out of his mouth, examines it, then puts it back in his mouth and continues to chew.
exhelodrvr1 said...
My mom grew up on a ND farm in the SE corner
exhelodrvr1 - if I may ask, where in the SE ND corner? My grandmother was born & raised on a farm in the SE corner of ND, near Abercrombie in Richland County.
One of my friends got his arm caught in an anger and had to cut himself free also. He grabbed a lead rope from the barn and made a tourniquet on the way to the house to get his mom to drive him to the hospital.
Unfortunately, mom was so hysterical at the sight of him and his severed arm, which he brought along in case they could reattach it, she couldn't drive. So he packed his arm in a cooler full of ice and put it in the truck bed so she wouldn't have to ride next to it and drove them both to the hospital with her crying and screaming for the entire 2 hour drive.
He'd as soon left her home but she had to sign for treatment as he was only 15 at the time.
Public opinion after the fact was that if mom wouldn't have been a city girl she'd have kept her head better and he was lucky she didn't get him killed acting like that.
He later said that he was in shock the whole time or he'd have never messed around trying to save the arm. "It looked like a roll of hamburger. You couldn't even tell if my fingers were on there" he said.
"I wonder if they throw out the whole siloful of seeds when a woman dies in it."
Quite a lot of it gets processed into oil and cattle feed, and anyway woman asphyxiating in it won't contaminate it.
So today is NY Post day at the blog, or so it seems. By and large, it's a more interesting paper than the NYT, and isn't nearly so closed-minded. Presents a nicer slice of life, too, much more diverse than the usual UWS anxieties about getting your kid into the right kindergarten that the NYT favors.
My great grandfather’s much younger sister was killed as a child in a grain silo accident.
My (deceased) aunt told me she used to play with her dolls in the silo. I think it provided privacy.
It's like a giant tube of quicksand.
I heard of something similar when I lived in Kodiak. Cannery workers were warned never to jump into a hold full of fish when unloading tenders, but this one guy kept ignoring the rule. Fish that had been in the hold for a while tended to stack up forming a solid mass, but fish that had only recently been loaded in still had something of the quality of a liquid. This guy jumped into a hold full of herring and instantly sank over his head. He was dead before they could recover him.
I vaguely remember a poem about a woman dying in a silo of corn. A friend of mine read it in high school. I think it was by Robert Penn Warren, but I can't find it. I remember the image of blonde hair mixing with the corn. Is that familiar to anyone here?
Wikipedia (of course) has an entire article on grain entrapment. According to Purdue's National Agricultural Confined Space Incident Database, they have documented 2,176 cases in the United States between 1962 and 2019, 1,276 of which resulted in deaths, an average of 22 deaths per year. Y'all can compare for yourselves with the number of other types of deaths which have been in the news lately.
This is where I know I can come to learn grain silo ecology. (Witness a favorite. But who knew there were bad cops in the city? And Danny Glover didn't work as one of them.)
"More people, I'm certain, die from auto asphyxiation accidents than from sunflower vat mishaps and yet no effort is made to design safeguards for this activity."
Well, why don't they just open the car windows? Geez, seems simple to me . . .
What? . . . .
. . . oh . . . um . . .
Nevermind.
"One of my friends got his arm caught in an anger and had to cut himself free also. He grabbed a lead rope from the barn and made a tourniquet on the way to the house to get his mom to drive him to the hospital.
Unfortunately, mom was so hysterical at the sight of him and his severed arm, which he brought along in case they could reattach it, she couldn't drive. So he packed his arm in a cooler full of ice and put it in the truck bed so she wouldn't have to ride next to it and drove them both to the hospital with her crying and screaming for the entire 2 hour drive.
He'd as soon left her home but she had to sign for treatment as he was only 15 at the time.
Public opinion after the fact was that if mom wouldn't have been a city girl she'd have kept her head better and he was lucky she didn't get him killed acting like that.
He later said that he was in shock the whole time or he'd have never messed around trying to save the arm. "It looked like a roll of hamburger. You couldn't even tell if my fingers were on there" he said.
6/12/20, 11:45 AM"
That is a Coen Brothers scene in my mind.
Mike Bloomberg could not be reached for comment.
Danny Glover could shoot people in the leg with a revolver from 50 yards away.
No one else on earth could expect to even hit a human at that distance with a revovler.
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