A Collection of Horrible Fates | Part 50

Ambient Songs:
By CoAg
https://www.youtube.com/@co.agmusic1823

Intro Theme by Swift Junai:
https://www.instagram.com/swiftjunai/?hl=en
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6hf5nMJ8s6LJJfFR4OQ3lg
https://open.spotify.com/artist/1PoG2b18MHocWZA8zQgWjO

Writers and researchers: Jay Adams
https://instagram.com/jayadamsdigital?igshid=MzMyNGUyNmU2YQ==

Jordan Gottschick https://www.youtube.com/@DerpsWithWolves/playlists

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
There is a terrifying phenomenon happening all across the world
on farms that most people don't know about. Workers show
up in the morning, get to work in a particular area,
something happens, and then they leave in a body bag.
And although this is a danger commonly known to farmers,
it keeps happening anyway. In fact, by some measures, this
phenomenon is on the rise. So in this video we're

(00:22):
going to look at what exactly is happening on farms
across the world, along with a few other horrific stories,
and as always, view discretion is strongly advised. It's a
job that most people pass by without a second thought.

(00:43):
Someone up on a roof lying shingles or spreading tar
under the blistering sun, but behind that everyday site is
actually one of the most dangerous professions in the United States.
In twenty eighteen, data from the US Bureau of Labor
Statistics ranked roofing fourth on the list of the twenty
five deadliest jobs in the By twenty twenty three, it
had risen a third, just by logging workers and commercial

(01:04):
fishing and hunting. And it's not hard to see why
roofing combines all the hazards of construction like heights, ladders, heat,
power tools, and unstable surfaces, with the added challenge of
working in unpredictable outdoor conditions, whether it's the extreme heat
in the summer or the icelick shingles in the winter.
Roofers are constantly operating environments that turn even a routine
task into a potential life or death situation, and in fact,

(01:28):
roofing is one of only four professions where the fatality
rate tops fifty deaths per one hundred thousand full time
workers each year from two thousand and three to twenty
thirteen alone, more than thirty five hundred construction workers, a
category that includes roofers, died from falls, and most of
them are preventable. And behind these statistics and figures are
real people, with real families and real futures that were
cut short. In two thousand and four, one of those

(01:51):
stores unfolded. On a chilly October morning in Torrington, Connecticut,
a twenty one year old roofer named Robert kissed his
wife and baby daughter goodbye when morning and then when
to work Like any other day. It was just past
eleven am on October fifteenth, two thousand and four and
six men were on the roof of Warner Theaters Nancy
Marine Studio in downtown Torrington. Two other workers were assisting

(02:11):
at the street level, and they were part of a
larger crew working to repair the aging structure. The setup
was also typical of a tar roofing job. On the
ground next to the theater sat a tar kettle about
three feet or one meter deep, filled with three hundred
gallons of molten hot roofing tar. This bubbled away at
temperatures between four hundred and seventy five and five hundred
degrees fair night or two hundred forty six to two

(02:32):
hundred and sixty degrees celsia's. A pipe then ran from
the kettle up to the roof, where the men would
spread the tar across the surface as they worked. As
the work continued, Robert was pushing a bucket across the
rooftop when suddenly he slipped and in a terrible instant
he plumbed it head first to the street below and
directly into that bubbling vat of tar. Two of the
men and rushed to plumb out, one of them being

(02:53):
Robert's own father in law, and both the men were
burdened the process, One of them so badly that he
needed to be airlifted via helicopter to a burn center
for Robert. Though the ordeal was almost instantly fatal from
the moment he basically touched the tar, he was gone.
In the parking lot behind the theater, the rest of
the crew gathered, Some wept openly. One man with his

(03:13):
face and closed spattered with tar, wandered in circles with
his head down, unable to speak. Another leaned against a
brick wall, shielding his eyes with a trembling forearm. Police
were then called in. Investigator from Osha arrived shortly after,
along with these cities Building inspector. Evidence was then collected
and photos were taken while questions were asked to witnesses
who could compose themselves enough to form a coherent sentence

(03:34):
about what took place. As the investigation wore on, the
findings would cast a long shadow onto the roofing industry
and the Roofing Company in particular. The company had been
cited for eight separate safety violations related to the project,
and two of those violations were for failing to provide
a fall rest system, which is basically safety gear that's
supposed to catch a worker before they plummet. You can

(03:54):
think harnesses attached to ropes or fall guards that up
at the edges of the roof. Unfortunately, none of them
equipment was in use at the time of the incident,
and it wasn't the first time the company had been
in trouble either, just three years earlier that they'd been
fined for the exact same thing. Robert's autopsy later confirmed
what police suspected the scene on the day of the accident.
He died from asphyxia by submersion and thermal injury in

(04:17):
plane terms. He founced the vat, couldn't breathe, and was
burned in an instant and tragically. It's not hard to
imagine how this could have been prevented through the use
of proper safety equipment. Any effort to protect the workers
in the roof that day could have interrupted the chain
of events that led to that rooftop slipping out from
under Robert's feet, yet none were in plates. October twenty

(04:39):
ninth to twenty thirteen started out like the previous work
day for the technicians on site at the Piet de
Witt wind farm in a village in the southwest of
the Netherlands. It was the second day of a maintenance
job on one of the wind turbines, which is a
pretty routine task for the team that specialized in turbine upkeep.
Four workers were up inside the nissel, which is a
capsule that sets at the top of the towers the

(05:00):
turbine's generator and mechanical parts. They were nearly two hundred
and thirty feet or seventy meters above the ground to
carrying out preventative maintenance on a Vestus V sixty six
turbine that had been operating for about a decade. These
kinds of machines are massive, powerful and usually reliable, but
like anything with moving parts, they require regular attention. Among
the team of four top the turbine that day were

(05:21):
nineteen year old Dan and twenty one year old Argent.
Both of them were from small towns in the Netherlands,
and I joined the team as part of a new
generation of turbine technicians. It was interesting and potentially dangerous
work for sure, but like any job, there's a kind
of routine that sets in when nothing goes wrong and
when jobs are long but uneventful, as the work of
the day continued in the nascell. Everything seemed to be

(05:41):
going according to plan, until without warning, smoke began to
fill the space, and a moment later the first flames
cropped up. The source was quickly traced back to the generator,
and while the exact cause was never officially confirmed, investigators
belief it started with a shore circuit inside that cramped
steel housing so high off the ground. Though the far
spread fast wind turbine, nescells aren't exactly fireproof, as they're

(06:02):
packed with electrical components, hydraulic systems, and flammable fluids, and
on top of that, there's not much room to move
and once a fire takes hold, escape options are limited,
and so the blaze quickly cut off access to ladder
and blocked any easy route down to the safety on
the ground. Two of the technicians managed to react fast.
One person later said they jumped to the flames to

(06:23):
reach a narrow staircase. It was a desperate move that
could have cost them their lives, but instead it saved them.
They were later seen on the ground dazed but alive,
thanks in part to their quick thinking. For Dan and Argin, however,
there was no clear way out because of their location
and how quickly the fire spread. They were trapped on
top of the nescelle as it raged. As this was

(06:43):
going on on the ground, a photograph of the wind
turbine was taken and it would quickly make headlines around
the world. Two figures stood high above the earth, surrounded
by smoke, and they appeared to be embracing one another.
This photo, which has made the rounds on social media
under the title the Last Hug, was a brief moment
of stillness in the middle of pure chaos, and it
was a snapshot of what no one should ever have

(07:04):
to face, the realization that help isn't coming fast enough
and there's no way out. In that moment, the two
young men had two choices. Either jumped to escape the
fire or wait for the fire and smoke to overtake them.
In the end, each man would make a different choice,
but tragically neither survived. As this tragedy was unfolding, fire
crews arrived quickly, but getting to the top of the

(07:25):
burning wind turbine isn't something you can do with a
standard ladder truck. The nasceelle was roughly the height of
a twenty storied building, and the fire was already raging
by the time responders arrived, so for hours the blaze
burned unchecked. The turbine's height, combined with the remote location
and the intensity of the blaze, made it nearly impossible
for local crews to get close. It wasn't until a
unit arrived at a large crane that anyone could even begin

(07:48):
approaching the nas cell, and by then the damage was
already done. Once the flames were extinguished and it was
safe to enter, the remains of one of the technicians
was found in the charred wreckage above. The other had
already been recovered from the field below. On the night
of July twenty seventh, twenty ten, something was eating wey
at Wyatt. At fourteen years old, he was full of

(08:10):
promise and personality, and just two weeks earlier he'd reached
a major milestone in a teenager's life. He got his
first job. When he started, his excitement was through the roof,
but after just two weeks he was ready to move
on to something else. This wasn't just some predictable teenage
hang up about not wanting to work, though a life
in agriculture isn't for everyone, and maybe why it had
already learned that he just wasn't cut out for it,

(08:31):
But that July night, he admitted to a family friend
that this was instead about fear. You see, Why was
working at a company just outside of Mount Carroll and Illinois,
and most of his time there thus far had been
spent inside the gigantic grain storage bins. Why it quickly
grew to hate the bins and even joked with his
family friend that he never wanted to see another Colonel
of Corn in his life. Although he didn't laugh after

(08:52):
making the statement, there was a real truth to what
he was saying. The bins had come to scare him,
but he couldn't quite put his finger on why. But
in any case, Why decided to tough it out and
give it a few more chances before he decided whether
to stay or quit and find something else to do
with this summer. The next morning was sweltering and the
heat made the airfiel heavy, especially inside the grain bins.

(09:12):
Whya joined nineteen year old Alex and twenty year old Will,
two slightly older friends who were also on crew that day,
and together they carried shovels and pickaxes up the ladder
of a towering grain bin. These bins come in a
variety of sizes, but this one was particularly massive. It
was four stories high with a capacity to store five
hundred thousand bushels of corn. The task for the three

(09:32):
employees that morning was to do something known as walking
down the grain. That's the industry term for breaking up
grain that's stuck together so it flows more freely to
the bottom of the bin. This is surprisingly hard and
dangerous work, and so much so that OSHA regulations explicitly
prohibit it to be performed by miners and restricted at
large commercial operations. But the company, like many small facilities,

(09:53):
either wasn't subject to these rules or outright ignored them.
The boys then used their shovels to push the corn
toward the kne shaped drainage hold the bin center. But
around nine forty five am something shifted, and why it
began to sink corn. Especially when flowing sword behaves like
quicksand you can quickly go from standing on a seemingly
solid surface to that surface disappearing beneath your feet. Why

(10:15):
it was then pulled under fast within seconds. His friend
saw him go down and then rush to help him,
and tried desperately to grab him and pull him back
to the surface, but it was hopeless. Realizing how bad
this was, Will shouted to another coworker near the exit letter,
telling him to run to the control room and shut
off the conveyors, which he did, but by then it
was too late, why it had already disappeared deep beneath

(10:35):
the surface. Alex and Will didn't abandon him, though, as
they stayed behind, still trying to dig him out, but
they quickly found themselves in similar trouble. Both Alex and
Will start to sink fast as well, first to waste deep,
then deeper. Over the next few moments, Alex would be
buried up to his neck and corn, and Will would
be buried up to his shoulders. Still able to use
his arms, though, Will did his best to clear corn

(10:56):
from Alex's mouth, trying to keep him breathing as the
corn sloped down to trickle as the conveyors turned off,
but eventually Alex slipped under two. Will meanwhile stayed conscious
and had no choice but to turn his attention to
keeping his own airway clear. Emergency rescue crews rided the
scene shortly afterward and were able to get Will tied
off before he slipped beneath the surface of the corn.
But Whyatt and Alex weren't so fortunate. They had become

(11:21):
so bared in the corn that their lifeless bodies weren't
recovered until after ten pm this same night. Tragically, both
of them had suffocated. It was later learned that on
the day of the instant, Will had been working there
for but a week. For Alex it was only a
second day on the job. And Whyatt at two weeks
was the grizzled veteran of the three. None of them
had been trained in grain bind safety, nor were they
provided with proper protective equipment. Wyatt also shouldn't have been

(11:44):
in the bin at all, as federal labor laws made
it illegal for some of his age to even enter it,
and yet there he was sent to do job that
would eventually kill him. All his fears about the bins
were well founded and sadly realized. After an investigation was done,
OSHA find the company five hundred and fifty thousand dollars,
which is one of the largest penalties the agency had
issued at the time. Still, no amount of money could

(12:06):
bring back Wide and Alex nor wipe away the trauma.
Will had to endure by watching his friends slip under
right in front of him. What happened that day wasn't
some freak accident. It was a well documented, well known
danger of agricultural work known as grain entrapment and engulfment.
This was also a textbook case of what it's called
active grain float. In fact, it happens all the time.

(12:28):
Understanding what happened begins with understanding how something as ordinary
as grain can become so lethal. Grain entrapment begins when
someone gets caught in a shifting mass of grain. It
often starts small, as a foot sinks in and then
a leg, but once the grain reaches waste level, escape
becomes almost impossible without outside help, and engulfment takes it further.
That's when a victim is pulled completely under, bared, alive,

(12:49):
and a sea of corn, soybeans, oats, or wheat. And
as horrifying as it sounds, it's almost always fatal because
when grain moves, it isn't so much a solid or
even a liquid. It acts like something in between, and
it's the bead catches most people off guard. Getting trapped
knee deep can take just four seconds, and total engulfment
can happen in under twenty seconds. If you think about that,
that's less time than it takes to tie your shoes

(13:10):
before you completely vanish. Part of this danger lies in
the physics of these massive grain bins. When grain is
being emptied from the bottom, like it was in Whyet
and Alex's case, it creates a suction effect that pulls
anything on top of it downward. And again it's not
a slow, gradual process. Grain can move extremely faster when
opening at the bottom of a bin, and then even
once the grain stops flowing, that doesn't necessarily mean the

(13:31):
dangerous past. If a victim is partially buried, the still
grain can act like concrete, as pressure around the body
can lock it in place. Even if someone is conscious
and breathing, they still can't move. And in fact, researchers
have tested this and they found that if the grain
reaches your knees, you might still get out without help.
At the wasst you're already stuck, and once it reaches
your chest, rescue requires a serious equipment coordination and a

(13:54):
whole lot of time, which most victims simply don't have.
The weight of the grain can also make things extremely
dangerous inside bins. Pulling someone out of waste deep grain
takes around four hundred to six hundred pounds of force.
If someone is fully engulfed, you're looking at nine hundred
pounds of force of more. That's like the equivalent of
trying to yank someone out of a concrete mold, and
it comes with severe injury risks, And then all of

(14:15):
that comes before you get to the real killer in
the grain pile, which is suffocation. Engulfment can do it
by crushing the chest alone, but more often victims suffocate
when fine parkles fill their noses and mouths where there's
simply nowhere left to breathe. Even if a small air
pocket exists, the pressure on the chest makes each breath
harder than the last one. Rare survivor of englfment described

(14:35):
it like having an eighty thousand pounds semi truck parked
on his chest. Another said it felt like the earth
itself was swallowing him. And even when someone is lucky
enough to keep their head above the grain, and that's
not the end of the story for starters. Most of
these instances don't happen in cities. They happen on farms,
often small family run. Operations in rural areas miles away
from trained emergency crews, paramedics and firefighters are often not

(14:58):
just a few minutes down the road. The people responding
first are often friends, coworkers, or relatives who are just
as unprepared as the person trapped. Even the spaces themselves
create significant rescue challenges. Grain bins are often confined and
closed and poorly ventilated, so getting into them safely is
a daunting task on its own. Getting out with another
person alive, though, is exponentially harder. The air doesn't make

(15:21):
things any easier either. Spoiling grain releases gases like carbon dioxide,
nitrogen dioxide, and other toxic compounds. In high enough concentrations
they cann smit unconscious or even cause death. Rescuers who
enter a bin without proper breathing protection can easily become
victims themselves, and if rescuers do arrive with the proper tools,
the process is still painstaking. To get someone out usually

(15:43):
begins with isolating the victim from their surrounding grain. That
means building a temporary wallt of plywood, sheet metal, tarps,
or whatever else is available. Once in place, rescuers can
begin carefully removing grain from around the victim one bucket
or one vacuum load at a time. Now, there are
three main snare that lead to entrapman and engulfment, and
we've already covered the first, which is active grain flow.

(16:04):
The second biggest risk is spoiled grain that's gone out
of condition. But it's not what you think. When this happens,
it can form a hardened crust along the top of
the bin, which can look like a solid floor. Underneath
that crust, however, is likely just empty space and a
hidden void. Tim Hansen, as sixty years old, knew the
risks of what's known as a spoiled grain bridge, as
he had spent a lifetime working on his family's farm

(16:24):
near Dick's, Nebraska. He climbed inside the bin with a
long pole one day in twenty fourteen, planning to break
through a stubborn clog that formed. His son, Chris, waited
outside with the radio, keeping tabs on his father as
a safety precaution. Suddenly, however, Tim stopped responding. Chris then
banged on the bin, called out, and eventually climbed to
the top, and when he looked down into the bin,
there was no sign of Tim. All that remained was

(16:47):
the pole that he'd been using, lying across the opening
near the center. Chris then jumped in and started digging
by hand, but there was nothing he could do. Tim
had fallen through a bridge of spoiled grain and was
swallowed within seconds. It took rescuers more than two hours
to recover his body, which had something below ten feet
or three meters of corn. And the threat inside grain
bins and silos doesn't always come from below. Sometimes the

(17:10):
danger lies above. In bins were grannis spoiled along the sidewalls,
it can harden and cling to the vertical surface. Eventually
someone has to dislodge it, and that's when the possibility
of a literal grain avalanche comes into play. Matthew was
just twenty years old when he was working with a
crew cleaning a soybean bin and goldfield eye Ona in
two thousand and eight. As part of the job, Matthew

(17:30):
stood near the discharge suit helping guide soybeans out as
his coworkers loosen the material attached the bins walls. When
one particular area of grain broke free, though it rushed
through the bin toward the discharge suit, the flow then
knocked Matthew off his feet and dragged him into the
chute toward the conveyor belt sitting outside. His foot was
then caught for a moment when a coworker tried to
hurriedly close the gate, only complicating things. Nothing Matthew's colleges

(17:53):
could do was enough, though they had no way to
safely extract him from the sheer amount of soybeans that
have become dislodged in that single swipe. With no time
and no viable rescue plant, they were forced to reopen
the shoot and Matthew's body was carried further down into
the system. He then tragically suffocated before anyone could reach him.
What's worse is that Matthew had been wearing a fall
harness that day, which is a standard procedure for the

(18:14):
task at hands. The problem was he just forgot to
clip himself to the lifeline that would have prevented him
from falling before the work started. With this all taken together,
it's easy to think that grain and trapments and engulfments
are rare, freak accidents or one off tragedies, but the
data tells a much darker truth. This is happening far
more often than most people realize. Since nineteen sixty four,

(18:35):
at least twelve hundred and twenty five grain entrapments have
been reported in the US, and that's just what's officially documented.
Experts believe the actual number is likely higher due to underreporting,
especially on small farms that operate outside the reach of
federal oversight. More than half law recorded instances involve corn,
and most of these occurrent states across the corn belt,
like Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, and Ohio. These are errors

(18:58):
where massive grain bits are everywhere and harvest volume is enormous.
And the real kicker in terms of numbers is that
more than seventy percent of entrapments happen on small or
family run farms, which again are exempt from OSHA's grain
handling safety regulations. In other words, the people most at
risk are also the least protected by the law. In
more recent years, grain bins have gotten larger, augers have

(19:19):
gotten faster, and the capacity to move grain has increased dramatically,
but these safety practices haven't kept up. In fact, while
overall farm injuries have been trending downward lately, grain entrapments
are on the rise. The most vulnerable groups are on
the opposite ends of the age spectrum and include those
younger than seventeen years old and those older than fifty five.
It's thought that the young often don't realize the danger

(19:40):
until it's too late, and the old have been doing
it so long that complacency sets in and tragically. Even
with better rescue equipment and more public awareness, the odds
of surviving entrapment haven't improved much. Year after year. At
the fatality rate hovers at or above fifty percent, and
in twenty twenty three it hit a staggering fifty nine
point three percent.