It happened 14 years ago, but Todd Underwood with the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration has vivid memories of being called out to investigate the engulfment of a worker at a grain elevator that he prefers not to name.
Underwood, who directs OSHA’s Wichita area office, said the elevator’s safety manager had gone into a grain bin in place of a younger co-worker to walk on the grain to tamp down clumps and air pockets.
“He didn’t want him going in,” Underwood said. “They were going to walk on top of the grain and try to knock it down. He said, ‘It’s too unsafe, so don’t you go in.'”
But then, tragedy struck.
“The bridging of the grain broke free,” Underwood said. “He fell and was engulfed and passed away.”
There are dozens of grain handling accidents that occur each year in the U.S. That’s why OSHA has placed several states under regional emphasis programs over the years to promote worker safety at grain handling facilities.
Missouri, which is under Underwood’s jurisdiction, is the latest state to be added to the list. The program aims to “target high-risk worksites, pushing employers to tackle the root cause of worker injuries and prioritize safety as a core business value,” said Billie A. Kizer, the OSHA Kansas City Regional administrator, in a news release.
Like other states on the list, including Kansas and Nebraska, Missouri has been the site of grain bin accidents that Underwood calls avoidable. OSHA has responded to three deaths, 13 accidents requiring amputation and 36 hospitalizations in the three states between Oct. 1, 2020 and Sept. 30, 2023, according to the agency.
Entrapment and engulfment
When it comes to grain bin entrapment and engulfment accidents, safety experts have a simple rule: never go inside a grain bin filled with grain. But at harvest time, problems can arise.
The grain, which is often corn, can clog up the auger – the rotating screw-like machinery used to move the grain in and out of the bin. It can also gather in clumps inside the bin, sticking to walls or forming air pockets that hinder transport.
When problems arise, workers can be tempted to ignore the safety rules, said Stuart Beckman, the safety director for Columbia Grain International. The company operates grain elevators and processing plants in North Dakota, Montana and other Plains and Western states.
“And then, people feel compelled to enter a bin to try and get that grain to move or walk that grain down,” Beckman said. “And those are very dangerous things that we do not allow.”
The danger lies in the sand-like properties of corn kernels when they’re gathered in a bin, said Salah Issa, an agriculture and industrial safety professor at the University of Illinois. He said it’s easy for anyone walking on corn in a bin to either sink into it, or to be caught in the flow of corn being loaded by an auger.
“It really doesn’t take long,” Issa said. “It takes maybe five seconds or so for the grain to reach up to your knee levels. Once it’s up to your knee levels, you cannot escape. You cannot get out. It just grabs you in.”
Issa said being trapped in grain is the most common type of accident that can happen in the grain storage industry. Workers can also be entangled or struck by machinery.
Another hazard is explosions inside grain bins, caused by a spark from machinery igniting grain dust. Underwood said these aren’t the most frequent, but are often fatal. He’s seen about six people killed by different grain explosions over the past 10 or 20 years.
Dozens of accidents
Grain engulfment accidents are a relatively recent phenomenon. For centuries, corn was harvested and stored while still on the cob. But Issa said grain bin accidents started to occur in the 1960s, when changes in technology led to corn being removed from the cob before storage.
The number of such accidents seems to have reached a peak in 2010, Issa said, and now fluctuates at lower numbers from year to year.
There were at least 27 cases of grain-related entrapments and 28 cases of other types of accidents in 2023, according to an annual report on accidents involving agricultural confined spaces in the U.S. from Purdue University.
Those 55 total cases, which include 29 fatal ones, are a nearly 34% decrease from the 83 cases in 2022. The number of grain entrapment cases also declined about 36% from the previous year.
But Issa is not ready to call that decrease a trend, saying that the number of grain-related accidents has been cyclical since their peak in 2010. And he noted that the Purdue annual report relies on grain-related accidents reported in the news media, which may not be a complete record.
Safety efforts
Stricter safety regulations and new technology have helped keep the number of accidents from growing higher, Issa said.
At Columbia Grain, Beckman said the company tries to keep grain as dry as possible to avoid deterioration that can encourage clumping and clogging. And he said their workers never enter a bin full of grain. Instead, poles and other special tools help workers clear clogs and clumps without having to enter the bin at all.
Issa said it’s also important to maintain machinery that is used to carry grain up to and down from grain bins, to reduce sparks that can ignite grain dust. He said a proper air filtration system can keep grain dust to a minimum.
Underwood said he doesn’t think employers put their workers in harm’s way deliberately. But when grain is being moved, he said it is very easy for safety rules to be overlooked and for regular cleanup and maintenance to fall behind.
“Our best advice is, companies need to have a good, strong grain safety and health program,” Underwood said. “And they need to be following it, because that tends to be the trend, is that we go out and we do find that some procedures and policies are not being followed.”
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
