A Henryville, Tennessee, farmer escaped a grain bin unscathed this week, thanks to first responders. The farmer had been stuck up to his neck before they set him free.
The man fell into the grain bin sometime before 2:12 p.m. local time Wednesday, when volunteer fire departments and other first responders were called to the scene.
By the time they arrived, the man was 90% buried in corn kernels, the Etheridge Fire Department said in a release.
Stuck in grain is like lodged in quicksand.
“It’s a force that pulls you down and collapses down on top of you at the same time and puts an immense amount of pressure on your body,” Tyler McDow with Lawrence County Fire & Rescue told Nashville CBS affiliate WTVF.
Mr. McDow added that the farmer had sunk to the point that the corn was just below his mouth when the rescue began. Another couple of inches would have suffocated the unnamed man.
Rescuers used something called a Great Wall device to save the man, hammering it around where he was trapped to separate him from the mass of the corn.
Afterward, a vacuum was used to remove the corn still encasing the man, ultimately letting him leave unharmed through an emergency access door at the bottom of the structure. By 4:20 p.m. local time, the man was out, awake, alert and uninjured, Lawrence County Fire & Rescue posted on Facebook.
