A southwest Iowa man has died after being submerged in grain for three hours. Clarke County Sheriff Bill Kerns says the farmer who called 911 told authorities he and a 39-year-old man from Creston were working in a grain bin near Murray.
“Evidently like the crust that forms on top of the beans had stopped it from going down into one part of the bin that they needed to be in — I suppose where the auger was at — and he was going to go in there and prod it and break it up, apparently,” the sheriff says. “And the owner, the farmer, crawled back down and went and got into his semi is my understanding and I suppose started unloading it, he did that for about eight minutes and then he crawled back up to the top of the grain bin and looked back down in it and could see him or couldn’t hear him or nothing and then he crawled back out of the grain bin and feel him down underneath the grain and he crawled back out of the grain bin and called for help.”
The sheriff says the farmer called 911 at about a quarter before nine this morning and estimated Eric Reasland of Creston had been trapped under the soybeans for about 10 minutes.
“By the time the equipment got there that could cut the holes and got the grain to flowing out out of the sides of the bin, I’m guessing it was about 45 minutes that he’d been submerged,” Kerns says. “We got him out of the grain bin somewhere around noon.”
First responders on the scene performed CPR and Reasland was taken to a hospital in Osceola, where he was pronounced dead by the emergency room doctor. The accident happened near an Iowa Select Farms facility in Murray.
(Reporting by Jordan Armstrong, KSIB, Creston)