By CELESTE BAUMGARTNER

Ohio Correspondent

DES MOINES, Iowa — In a bin, flowing grain can pull someone in up to their waist in 15 seconds and completely submerge them in half a minute.

Rural firefighters are often the only line of defense when this happens. Unfortunately, many of them lack the specialized techniques and equipment necessary for a grain bin rescue.

In conjunction with Grain Bin Safety Week (Feb. 18-24), Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. is teaming up with the National Education Center for Agricultural Safety (NECAS), KC Supply and others to award emergency first aid responders with grain rescue tubes and hands-on training to help save lives.

The contest goes through April 30. To enter, describe how your local fire department or emergency rescue team and community would benefit from grain entrapment training and a rescue tube, and how the tube could be shared with nearby departments. Anyone except Nationwide employees can nominate a fire department and firefighters can nominate their own.

“About five years ago we were going through a rash of injuries,” said Steve Simmons, associate vice president of agribusiness for Nationwide. “It started with a father and son who were overcome by fumes. Then I saw an article about how more awareness, more training needs to be done for safety in grain bins.”

Nationwide invests a lot of money on training and safety, Simmons said. The company came up with the idea of a contest: A company would supply a grain entrapment tube, which is used to stabilize someone who is entrapped in a grain bin, and then Nationwide would pay to have the training done by the NECAS.

The 2018 contest is their fifth annual. Nationwide has awarded grain bin rescue tubes and training to 48 fire departments in 18 states. Departments in Westphalia, Kan., and Glenville, Minn., have actually saved the lives of farmers trapped in a grain bin with the tubes and training they won.

There were 60 confirmed grain bin entrapments and incidents in other confined spaces on U.S. farms in 2016, according to Purdue University. That’s a 27 percent increase from 2015.

Dan Neenan, director of NECAS, has suggestions for avoiding grain bin entrapments. The first thing a farmer needs to do is think about grain quality management – to be sure they’re drying the grain down for storage, and that they’re not trying to store it at over 20 percent moisture content, which could cause it to mold and clump.

Although there is no law about people under age 18 entering a grain bin, Neenan strongly recommends anyone entering a bin be older than 18.

“Next, we need to lock out and tag out the power source of the auger,” he said. “If you are in the bin and the power source gets turned on it can pull you into your waist in 15 seconds and completely submerge you in 30.

“If I’m working with my brother and something goes wrong with the bin, and I turn the auger off and go inside to work on it, and he walks by and flips that switch on while I’m inside and I holler ‘Help!’ he won’t hear me. If he has walked too far away, there possibly won’t be enough time.”

Farmers need to perform air quality sampling to make sure there is at least 19.5 percent oxygen. An example of why is a couple of years ago, there had been a fire in a grain bin, Neenan said. The fire was extinguished and the farmer and his son were going in to check the damage.

The fire had used all of the available oxygen inside the bin, so the moment they stepped onto the ladder, they ran out of oxygen and suffocated.

Everybody going into a grain bin needs to be wearing a harness and be tied off, he explained. If they would step on some crusty grain and there is a void area below, they could be trapped under the grain.

“The most important rule, and the rule that is broken the most in farming, is, entering into a confined space such as a grain bin is a minimum of a two-person job,” Neenan stressed, “the person going into the space and a reliable attendant outside whose only job is to watch what is going on inside.

“If that (lead) person becomes unresponsive or trapped, the attendant’s job is not to go in after them, but to call for emergency services.”

To enter your preferred rescue department into the Nationwide contest, visit www.grainbinsafetyweek.com