Joey Berntsen emerged unscathed, and feeling not a little fortunate, after being freed from a grain bin north of LaHarpe Thursday evening.
Berntsen, 66, had been working on top of a pile of corn when it collapsed beneath him, sending him sliding down the side of the grain bin.
By the time he stopped, the cascading grain had enveloped him up to his neck.
Over the next four hours, emergency crews worked both feverishly and meticulously to free Berntsen from the grain pile.
He was taken via ambulance to Allen County Regional Hospital for observation, where he was given a clean bill of health.
“I was lucky,” Berntsen said Sunday. “I just did a stupid one.”
BERNTSEN said he was clearing out cockleburs amidst the grain by poking at the pile with a long plastic pole in order for the grain to reach the auger, when it suddenly “came down a lot faster than I figured it would,” taking him with it down into the 10,000 bushel galvanized steel bin.
The Berntsen farm is at the 3000 block of Utah Road.
In what could have been a true calamity came with a stroke of fortune. For one, Berntsen fell feet-first alongside the corn pile. And by the time the shifting stopped, his right arm was still free and able to reach the phone in his shirt pocket.
Berntsen immediately called his sister, asking her to call Joe Meiwes, a neighbor and volunteer firefighter.
“And then I told her to call 911, because I knew I was stuck.”
BERNTSEN was also fortunate he could still breathe freely and that the dust and heat inside the bin weren’t as oppressive as one might expect.
“The main thing was I never got excited, or started breathing too hard,” he recalled.
Rescue units from LaHarpe, Iola, Colony and Anderson County converged.
“If anything, I felt bad because those guys were working for three or four hours trying to get me out of there,” he said.
Two tools were most helpful in getting him extricated, none more so than metal panels provided by the Anderson County Emergency Management Department. The panels were inserted into the grain around Berntsen to prevent the corn from falling back around him as workers scooped it away using a small bucket.
