'If you step in, it sucks you in,' sheriff says
GRANGEVILLE, Calif. - A dairy worker and his 8-year-old son died in a manure pit on the farm where they lived, authorities said Tuesday. Luis Gutierrez, 27, and Luis Armando Gutierrez went to feed calves Saturday night and apparently stumbled upon the manure pit in the dark, investigators said.
"The 9-year-old was the oldest of four children Luis Gutierrez had with his 22-year-old wife, Maria."
Which means she was pregnant at 12 or 13. Yikes.
quickmanure!
Well, that's got to be one of the worst ways to die. Ever.
Recently, in the UK, a company was running maintenance on a semi-active industrial oven when an apprentice got stuck in the oven. He was baked alive.
Apparently, you start to hallucinate when the cooking process enters its final stages.
It is, indeed, a crappy way to go.
Yeah, drowning/suffocating is supposed to be pretty bad, this has to be several orders of magnitude worse.
"you see this? This is shit, and this: is shynola"
-"shit.... Shynola...."
"You're gonna be all right"
So, part of my childhood was spent on a farm in Germany.
My uncle, at the time, had 1 horse and 8 bulls (4 2-years & 4 1-years).
As with any farm with bulls & horses, there was a large manure pile. Like... a 20 foot high manure pile (eventually turned into compost/fertilizer, with leftover vegetables, etc., you get the idea). One sunny afternoon, I was chasing my (7 years) older brother around the barnyard. I was probably about 6. This would make my brother 13, and significantly (at last 2 feet, he's 6'4" now) taller than me.
He, as older brothers do, got sick of me chasing him.
We were both wearing rubber boots. He ran into the base of the manure pile which, as anyone who knows can tell you, is basically... liquid. Uhm... make of that what you will, and then multiply the nasty in your head by about 50. So, of course, I chased him into the base of the manure pile.
Well, my boots didn't come up as high as his, so I had wet manure-pile run-off pouring... POURING into my rubber boots.
My brother, whose boots were much higher and whose feet were therefore dry, laughed his ass off and my mother, who did the bulk of the clean-up, was cursing the entire time.
Good times.
I'm not a farmer but...
Why didn't they build some sort of safety fence around this thing?
Manure ponds I've are surrounded by an embankment so you have to climb up to fall in. Should be pretty obvious.
investigators don't suspect foul play.
I dunno, it sound pretty foul to me.
There have been a number of accidents like this. Manure pits are deadly, but they're the de facto way of handling waste in large-scale confinement animal feeding operations, because it's much easier to shoot a high-pressure hose at 25,000 pounds of shit per day than it is to shovel it.
Really, there isn't a safe, sustainable, and cost-effective way to deal with that much manure that close together. Yet another reason why large-scale CAFOs are a Bad Idea.
What a shitty way to go.