Crushed by Corn: Trapped in a Grain Bin
3/26/202650 min
A young Iowa farmer ends up in a bizarre and terrifying scenario. When Arick Baker climbs inside a giant storage container full of hundreds of tons of corn, it seems all in a day’s work. But a rapid-fire series of events will see him sink into the mountain of grain, swallowed whole like he’s falling through quicksand. Subsumed and crushed, he is buried alive, barely able to breathe… and heading towards the rotating blades of the container’s machinery…
A Noiser podcast production. Hosted by John Hopkins.
Written by Heléna Lewis | Produced by Ed Baran...
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
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John Hopkins· Host0:29
[suspenseful music] It's late morning on June the 26th, 2013, a scorchingly hot day in Hardin County, North Central Iowa. The atmosphere is heavy and humid, the gathering heat trapped beneath a wide, unbroken blue sky. The fierce sun bakes the empty asphalt roads, and the air shimmers over the patchwork of fields that make up this pocket of America's Midwest. Dotted across the landscape are indications of the area's thriving agricultural output. Family farms, owned for generations, stretch out over the fields. Here and there, you'll find cattle barns, heavy-duty machinery, and crop storage facilities. Among the largest of these are grain bins, enormous silo-like containers. Inside these vast steel structures, thousands of bushels worth of harvested