Coulter Fire Department receives gran bin rescue tube, training

A rural Franklin County fire department on Monday received a life saving piece of equipment designed to help farmers and grain producers trapped in dire situations.

Corteva Agriscience, the Agriculture Division of DowDuPont, recently donated a grain bin rescue tube and an auger to the Coulter Fire Department. The six-sided tube is placed panel by panel around a victim trapped in a grain bin. Once secure, the auger is used to remove corn from inside the tube until the victim can safely be lifted out of the tube.

The Coulter Fire Department received the tube on Monday, along with a training course complete with live demonstrations conducted by the National Education Center for Agricultural Safety (NECAS).

Members from the Latimer Fire Department and West Franklin EMS also attended the training, held at Ag Solutions.

Kyle McCormick, a firefighter with the Latimer department and employee at Ag Solutions, said that while situations in which the tube needs to be used may be few and far between, the availability of the equipment can be the difference between an easier rescue and an impossible one.

“If you don’t have one of these, you have to come up with a way to surround a person that’s buried in the corn in order to get the away from them,” he said. “You either have to scoop away all the corn or take it all the way out from the bottom. Obviously you can’t do that when you’re surrounded in corn and have that pressure pushing against you.

“It’s once in a lifetime, but if it saves just that one person, it’s worth it,” he added.

Traci Rodemeyer, Marketing and Communications Manager with Corteva, said that Coulter is the 21st community across the United States to receive a rescue tube from Corteva. She said the donations were targeted at rural areas in the United States where Pioneer seeds had a major presence and where rescue equipment was needed. Once narrowed down, Corteva awarded the equipment to the nearly two-dozen communities across the country.

She said that Corteva believes in the importance of educating both farmers and first responders in grain bin safety, especially following a year where weather created factors not normally seen in the harvest season.

“The timing is really important, now more than ever, to be educating our farmers, educating our first responders on, first and foremost, don’t get into a grain bin, how to do that safely and if something happens, how to safely extract them,” she said.

Coulter Fire Chief Kevin Erickson said he was appreciative of the donation and knows that while a circumstance to use the equipment may be rare, having the readiness is immeasurably valuable and potentially life-saving.

“Years ago, we would’ve had to cut the bin open and drain the corn out,’ he said. “These things fit in the bin, they come apart and they’re light-weight.”

He added that the equipment’s benefits won’t be limited to just Coulter, should a situation arise.

“It’s important for everyone,” he said. “It’s not just going to be one department using it.”

Latimer Fire Chief Brian Folkerts added that the training and equipment for the Coulter Fire Department, along with the tube already owned by the Latimer Fire Department brings the area an added measure of readiness in the event of an unfathomable situation.

“Now we have training and tools that will quickly save lives,” he said. “This saves time and time is life.”