From www.cbc.ca
A close call on a Nova Scotia farm brought back memories for a Lambton county farmer who years ago helped invent a tool to stop grain silos from becoming deadly.
“A number of years back there was a 4-H member killed in a grain incident, similar to the one that happened in Nova Scotia,” said dairy farmer George Dickenson.
That prompted the invention of the grain excavation tool or G.E.T. “So we put it to the kids, and kind of kept working different prototypes until we came up with the one that we felt worked,” Dickenson said.
On Feb 24, 2015 a 20-year old man was nearly buried alive when he sank in a Great Village, N.S., grain elevator and managed to call help using his cell phone.
The farmer was trying to move grain from one bin to another, but the auger wasn’t working. The farmer’s call for help brought two co-workers to the elevator. They managed to get a rope around the sinking man before he sank beneath the grain.
“Oh ya it works. We’ve done dummy training and everything else,” said Dickenson, who would like to see G.E.T. devices in all grain elevators. “That was our goal. If we could get something that was fairly inexpensive and simple,” he said.
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