TROY TOWNSHIP — Firefighter Patrick Compton was trained on grain bin rescue operations, but he had never needed to put those skills in action.
That changed two days after Christmas, when Bellville resident Mark Berry fell and became trapped in a grain silo.
Compton spent three hours on the scene with fellow firefighters from Troy Township, staging a risky but ultimately successful effort to save Berry’s life.
Those firefighters were recognized for their successful lifesaving efforts last month with a Star of Life award from the Ohio Public Safety Department.
Recipients included Compton, firefighters Matt Lyon and Brenden Ganshorn and Lt. Aaron Hoptry.
Grain bin rescues are very rare, Chief Rich Compton said.
“It’s probably been 30 years since we did the last one, at least,” Compton said. “It’s a great honor to see the hard work that they put in get recognized.”
A daring rescue
After falling into the grain bin, Berry used his Bluetooth headset to contact his wife for help. She called 911 and alerted first responders that he’d been trapped for at least 20 minutes.
The Troy Township Fire Department responded, along with mutual aid from the Fredericktown Community Fire District, Fredericktown EMS, Mansfield Fire Department, Mt. Gilead Fire Department and Delaware-county based BST&G Fire District and Porter-Kingston Fire District.
When units arrived, they found a 35-foot grain silo about three-quarters full of dried corn. Staging a rescue would take thoughtful planning and flawless execution.
A bin full of grain or corn can act similarly to quicksand, sucking a person down and suffocating them with one wrong move.
Medics made contact with Berry using an exterior ladder. He was alert and oriented with one arm free from the corn. But he was about 8 to 10 feet from the nearest entry/exit point.
Rescuers provided Berry with a safety rope secured to the exterior ladder, which he was able to hold onto. They also gave Berry an oxygen mask to hold to his face.
Crews then launched an extended rescue operation. Everyone had a role to play, with Hoptry as the incident commander.
Ganshorn, a rescue technician with military training, donned a harness connected to a pulley system. Then crews lowered him into the silo.
Due to forceful grip of flowing grain, a person cannot be pulled from a silo without risk of injury to the spinal column if the grain is at waist level or higher, according to a publication from North Dakota State University.
So Ganshorn kept a hand on Berry’s hand, even after he briefly became unresponsive and sank beneath the corn.
Crews stationed around the silo cut holes to release the corn. Once the silo was less than half full, rescuers entered the silo and dug Berry out by hand.
“We had to use basically large metal snow shovels to dig him out and then we were also using those shovels to hold corn back while we were digging him out,” Firefighter Patrick Compton said.
After that, Berry was transported to the hospital.
“It’s a high-stress scenario and there’s a lot of technical parts that go into it,” said Compton, a firefighter with the Troy Township Fire Department.
“We’re very thankful for the outcome that we had and all the assistance we received from our mutual aid departments.
“To us, it was just another day,” he added.
