Typical unloading rates will completely bury a worker in less than a minute.
#Grain silo fires free#
In 10 seconds or less, you will be thigh-deep and unable to free yourself, since the moving grain cannot develop support. While you usually only sink several inches to a foot in still grain, you can sink to your knees almost immediately in flowing grain. The flowing grain behaves similarly to quicksand, making escape very difficult. A person entering the bin will be carried to the center and quickly drawn under in this column of grain. Shortly after the grain starts flowing, a funnel-shaped flow pattern develops in which grain from the surface flows to the center, then down to the floor in a column (Figure 3-1). Flat-bottomed grain bins are usually emptied through the center of the bin floor.
Suffocation in grain bins usually occurs when a person is buried while the bin is being emptied. If you have already read one of the other sections of this handbook, some of the material in this section may be a review for you. Each of the five sections of this handbook is meant to stand alone, so some hazards will be discussed in more than one section. This section is the third part of a five-part handbook on grain- and silage-handling hazards. Many other hazards are also associated with silage and grain storage, such as being crushed by a collapse of crusted material, falling from a bin or silo, or being injured in a fire or explosion. Suffocation under silage or grain was the leading cause of grain-handling fatalities for the period 1985 through 1989.
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