By Leslie Cholowsky, Editor, The Community Press
On an early morning in May, Aaron Dingle, an 18-year-old New Zealand man here in Alberta working as a farmhand, was rescued from a canola bin where he was buried up to his neck.
The entire incident could have ended in tragedy but for the quick response of his employers, and the actions, training, and use of specialized equipment by Hardisty and Killam firefighters who answered the call.
Dingle is working at the Burden farm north of Lougheed on an informal farm exchange. John Burden says, “We were part of the Ag Exchange program for many years, and now all those kids keep sending their friends and family our way.” Burden says it’s also much easier for foreign farm workers to come now than in the past.
Burden, his son Graham, and Dingle were unloading a canola bin last week, one where they saw a heated core and some sprouting in a small area.
Graham says he’d worked in the bin all day Tuesday with a grain vac, sucking out any problem spots, and could see that the further down towards the centre, there was a lot of good grain.
Burden says the bin had been full, but they’d taken out two truckloads, then dropped a ladder in to catch any remaining areas of bad grain.
Graham says when he’s working in a bin alone, he has a signal worked out to bang on the side if he’s in any trouble.
He says, “Aaron and I talked about that on the way to the bin. It’s a vulnerable position, and I told him that if he felt like his feet were sinking that he had to start moving to get bouyant.
I told him not to chase any small bits of grain, and to keep to his side,” as the two worked on opposite sides of the bin.
Both Graham and Aaron both entered the bin, and everything was going well. But at one point, as Graham was heading up the ladder with a bucket of grain to dump, he says he heard Aaron say, ‘Oh, I think I’m stuck.’
“He said he couldn’t get his feet up out of the canola.” Burden says in the four to five seconds it took him to get up the ladder to call to John to shut off the auger, Aaron went from knee deep to mid-torso.
He couldn’t find John immediately, and so thought he would have to climb out to shut the auger off, when he heard the auger stop. “In less than 10 seconds from start to finish he went from not being able to move his feet to being under the canola.”
John, who had just been checking the gauges on the nearly full trailers was immediately back to the auger when it shut off. The auger had jammed with Dingle’s boot.
Graham told him that he thought Dingles’s foot must have been in it, and asked John to call for rescue while he went back down the ladder to Aaron, who was by then completely under the grain.
Graham said he paddled the grain away from where he’d seen Dingle last until he could see his head. He uncovered Dingle’s face in just a few seconds.
Burden then used the shovels he and Dingle had been using to form a barrier between Dingle and the grain, and laid down across them to continue to move the grain away from Dingle’s face. He said he took inventory of what tools he had with him in the bin, and tried to use them in the best manner possible. He even positioned the bucket so that moving grain would go into the bucket, not Dingle’s face.
Burden says that with Dingle’s face cleared, he then started to worry about his feet, not knowing what state Dingle’s feet were in if his boot caused the auger to quit.
He said, “I watched him closely for the first five minutes to be sure he wasn’t going into shock or losing blood, but he seemed fine.”
Burden said after a tense few minutes, both he and Dingle relaxed to some degree while waiting for the FRESS firefighters to respond.
Fire Chief Joe Knievel was first on scene, within 11 minutes from John’s call. He’d been working just a few miles away when dispatch called.
Hardisty Deputy Chief Hobie Campbell, who was one of the first responders for Hardisty, said he’d asked dispatch to call Killam within minutes of receiving the call when he’d heard the nature of the emergency, as he was aware that Killam Station had the grain bin rescue equipment and training.
Knievel says he immediately climbed up to the bin and let Burden and Dingle know that crews were on the way. He also replaced both the ladders on the inside and outsides of the bin with the help of Hardisty rescue, who arrived shortly after he did.
Meanwhile in the bin, Dingle had managed to free his hands.
Knievel says that when EMS arrived on scene, an advanced-care paramedic also came up the ladder to the bin’s top to assess Dingle.
When the specialized equipment arrived on the scene, Knievel and firefighter Derek Kroetsch first lowered crates onto the surface of the canola that operate on the same idea as snowshoes, spreading their weight over a larger area.
The two then set up the panels of the rescue dam, which formed a closed circle around Dingle, as they inserted and interlocked it panel by panel.
Once Dingle was enclosed within the panels a mini-auger, operated by a drill, was used to remove the grain inside the unit. When that was done, Dingle was able to use the steps inside the unit to climb out.
Knievel says once Dingle was out and on the edge, he checked his foot, and bandaged his toes.
He says Dingle was set on climbing his way out and down on his own, so that was the next step.
Once down, he was taken by ground ambulance to Wainwright Health Centre, where he spent a night. He ended up losing some of the skin off pads of two toes.
This was the first time FRESS firefighters had an opportunity to use the specialized rescue equipment purchased back in 2022, when the Killam FRESS Station hosted the BeGrainSafe training, which led to the purchase of the equipment.
In that program’s overview, it states: “In response to increased grain entrapment fatalities, the Canadian Agriculture Safety Association’s BeGrainSafe program has worked to save lives since 2017.
“From awareness-raising displays and demonstrations at farm shows to firefighter training and producer education, we reach all ages with our grain safety message.”
John and Graham Burden, along with Knievel, say that there were a lot of things that went just right that day. Graham says, “There were so many points of luck and turned this into a success story.
“Had the grain been any deeper, things might have been different. Had Aaron’s boot not come off so easily, things might have been different. Had it been a different grain in the bin, things might have been different.”
Knievel says getting the equipment around Dingle went perfectly, too.
John says he’s seen grain entrapment accidents that have ended in tragedy. He says a few years ago he was in a trailer plucking out a dead pigeon when he was shocked at how fast the grain sucked his boots to the bottom of the trailer.
Safety is not something the Burdens take lightly, and Graham says it’s not a situation he ever plans to go through again. The family wanted to share this story to raise safety awareness and “hopefully keep this from happening to anyone else.”
Dingle requested a meet up with the firefighters who responded to the call, and last Wednesday members of both the Hardisty and Killam Fire Station met with him in Killam. He conveyed his appreciation for their efforts that day, and said he was going home, back to New Zealand, but hoped to return soon. He seemed in excellent spirits and said he wasn’t letting this one incident keep him from learning more about grain farming.
Back in New Zealand, Dingle and his family operate a large dairy farm near Te Kauwhata. He’s only been in Canada three weeks, with the first week of that in Vancouver. He says he really has loved his time here and he really wants to return and finish out the harvest with the Burden family. “I’m looking to come back as soon as I can,” he says.
He was presented with a FRESS patch, a challenge coin, and even a special FRESS beer can by Regional Fire Chief Derek Homme. In return, he’d brought a case of beer for the firefighters to share.
Knievel says he spoke to a director at the BeGrainSafe program after the incident, wanting to share the good news, and was told this is the fourth successful rescue in Canada, and the second in Alberta, this year, using the specialized equipment and training.
He’s tentatively planning another training session, and plans to invite all FRESS stations to participate.
Read this and more, originally from the May 20 edition of The Community Press!
