Mount Carroll, a small, close-knit northwestern Illinois community, endured a nightmarish grain-elevator farm accident last summer that killed two teenage workers, Alex Pacas, 19, and Wyatt Whitebread, just 14, and injured 20-year-old Will Piper. The high school and college students were engulfed by corn inside an elevator owned by Haasbach LLC, and the two who died suffocated under 30 feet of corn.
The rescue effort gives an idea of the magnitude of the fatal mass of corn. Emergency workers had to cut holes in the sides of the grain elevator, releasing thousands of pounds of corn that were removed by semi trucks to another storage location.
The U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration heavily regulates safety practices in most grain handling facilities. OSHA specifically prohibits employees from "walking down grain" defined as "where an employee walks on grain to make it flow within or out from a grain storage structure, or where an employee is on moving grain." The regulations include corn within their definition of "grain."
...