By Frederick Melo
The St. Paul Pioneer Press
FARMINGTON, Minn. — Four days after spending more than eight hours trapped up to his chest inside a Farmington grain silo, Mark Malecha returned to work Monday, almost — but not quite — ready to answer questions about his ordeal.
“I can’t today,” said Malecha, manager of the P.H. Feely and Son grain bin, while prepping for his interview with state inspectors from the Minnesota Occupational Safety and Health Administration. “We have OSHA coming in tomorrow.”
Authorities are investigating reports that Malecha was not wearing a safety harness when, while attempting to unclog clumped or frozen grain, he fell into the bin shortly after 11 a.m. Thursday. He quickly became wedged in almost to his neck, drawing emergency services from across the metro area. Crews from as far away as Rochester were on standby.
“We had about 130 responders there,” Farmington Fire Marshal John Powers said.
Malecha survived without so much as a broken bone, but the manpower, expense and near loss of life has health and safety officials taking notice.
OSHA spokesman James Honerman said his agency has put special emphasis on grain bin safety in its strategic plan. He said OSHA will increase compliance inspections and offer free safety consultations over the next five years.
In the past five years, 12 people have suffocated or been crushed to death in grain-handling operations in Minnesota, he said. Nine deaths were on family farms; three occurred in OSHA-regulated businesses.
Honerman said a common factor in deadly and near-miss incidents appears to be workers walking on top of grain to dislodge it after it becomes stuck. The grain either collapses beneath them or falls down on top of them from the side of the bin, engulfing them.
Endres Processing in Rosemount was fined $83,500 after a worker became trapped in feed and died in June 2006. OSHA slapped Endres with 10 citations for, among other things, allowing workers to walk on top of the grain and failing to maintain an emergency plan to deal with such situations.
Authorities say Malecha’s mishap could have ended just as badly.
Until his rescue, Malecha was positioned in about 10 or 12 feet of grain, more than 40 feet down, toward the south side of the bin, a mountain of quicksand-like feed sloping upward from his location. The century-old bin overlooks City Hall, putting Malecha at the center of the action in Farmington that day in more ways than one.
Freeing Malecha was delicate work. Rescuers worried the grain would shift and bury him as workers, lowered by harness, dug him out by hand and pail, essentially tunneling upside down in the cold. The bin’s maximum capacity is 75,000 bushels — the equivalent of more than 21 railroad grain cars.
Authorities outfitted Malecha with an oxygen mask and rigged a plywood box around him, creating a barricade they could dig around.
In all, at least a dozen emergency organizations responded. Among them was the 5-year-old Minnesota Task Force One, an interjurisdictional group of emergency responders sponsored by Dakota County and the fire departments of Edina, Minneapolis, St. Paul and Rochester, who train together to handle trench collapses and other emergencies requiring technical know-how.
“Technical rescues are very time and personnel intensive. It took us seven hours to get one guy out, and you look at all the equipment that we used,” said Bloomington Fire Chief Ulie Seal, who administers the task force.
“It was in a high-angle environment, so you had to use a lot of technical rope skills to gain access to him,” Seal said. “They couldn’t put any weight on the pile, so they had to stay suspended.”
Dr. Paul Satterlee, a task force member who serves as associate medical director for Allina Medical Transportation, was one of a crew of professionals overseeing Malecha’s care. He said seven medics traded shifts inside the bin, monitoring an IV-line that fed warm bicarbonate fluids— a baking soda-like substance — into Malecha’s bloodstream to keep his blood acidity low and combat any accumulating toxins, a possible side effect of muscle damage.
“He did very well,” Satterlee said. “There were about three potential problems — one was cold, two was potential muscle injury and kidney damage, and three was asphyxiation from all the pressure on his chest.”
Also on hand were vacuum trucks and front-end loaders, in case the grain had to be sucked out of the bin. Powers said that through mutual aid agreements, individual cities agree to foot the bill for the first eight hours of services they provide each other during emergency situations.
Shortly after arriving at the scene, Powers could hear the Union Pacific train coming along tracks that would soon take it just past the silo. Worried about vibrations dislodging more grain, he placed a quick call to the Dakota Communications Center, which handles 911 dispatching across Dakota County. An emergency contact plan went into effect.
“They acted so fast on that, it stopped before it could get there,” Powers said.
Hours later, Malecha was being lowered by harness to the ground, giving his wife and emergency crews a big thumbs-up the whole way.
Doug Gilbertson, owner of Gilbertson Feed and Grain Inc., acquired the Feely grain elevator from the Feely family in 2006. He had little to say about Malecha’s hair-raising ordeal on Monday.
“We’re tight-lipped because of the OSHA case going on,” he said.
He did, however, have a message for the many police, fire, ambulance and public works crews that came to Malecha’s rescue.
“We want to thank them all,” Gilbertson said. “Darn right we do. They did a great job.”
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