Will Piper, 20, who was also working that day, remembers what happened. It was 19-year-old Alex Pacas’ second day at the facility. Whitebread wasn’t the only victim to lose his life in Bin No. We do repeat visits to the worst companies.” We go after companies we think are scofflaws. “We do everything we can within the current regulatory framework,” OSHA administrator David Michaels told Berkes and Morris. Cones, which can trap workers, form in the flowing grain as it’s drained from bins. Grain operations manager Austin Clubb, wearing a body harness for safety, gazes into the “cone” inside a massive grain bin at Amana Farms in Homestead, Iowa. Three resulted in charges, and one is still under review,” wrote Berkes and Morris. Eight were referred to federal prosecutors. “An examination of OHSA grain engulfment data and the agency’s criminal referral records shows at least 19 fatal and nonfatal grain incidents since 2001 with willful citations, the kind that trigger consideration of federal charges. NPR and CPI found that grain incidents brought few criminal prosecutions. We found that to be true and indicative of all worker fatalities.” Hayes told us that fines were routinely slashed and that prosecutions were rare even in the most egregious cases. He met with OSHA after that record year and was astonished when OSHA officials asked him what more they could do. “He told us about his ongoing activism, especially aimed at grain deaths. “We talked to Ron Hayes, whose son died in a grain bin in Florida in 1993,” Berkes said. “I noticed how MSHA (Mine Safety and Health Administration) routinely cut fines even when employers were willful and egregious and coal miners died,” Berkes told PBS NewsHour.Ī year later, after a report of a grain elevator explosion in Kansas that killed six, and a report by Purdue University that sited record entrapments and suffocation deaths in grain, Berkes teamed with Morris to begin a reporting project on death tolls from grain bin accidents. Howard Berkes of NPR and Jim Morris of CPI spent six months reviewing government documents, interviewing workers, government officials, victims’ families, company owners and legal and agriculture industry experts who have studied grain bin working conditions.īerkes said he first noticed oversight from government regulators while reporting on the Upper Big Branch coal mine disaster in 2010. #Died in a grain silo tv show seriesThe series highlights the dangerous working conditions at the country’s grain storage facilities, how government agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration oversee the industry and the penalties for companies that violate workplace safety laws. Whitebread’s story is just one of many highlighted in an investigative series, “Buried in Grain,” by NPR, the Center for Public Integrity, Harvest Public Media and the Kansas City Star. Whitebread was just 14 years old when he was killed that day, sucked under the suffocating weight of grain that gave way below his feet. He had his pick and shovel and climbed the four stories to the top of the bin, half-filled with 250,000 bushels of wet corn. He had been working in the grain bins for just two weeks. On a scorching July day in 2010, Wyatt Whitebread showed up for work at the Haasbach LLC grain storage complex in Mount Carroll, Ill. More than 200 people worked to rescue Piper and recover the bodies of Whitebread and Pacas. The 2010 rescue and recovery effort at Bin No.
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