A new grain safety training center soon to open in northwest Ohio will provide grain elevator professionals, firefighters, and other first responders with training on grain bin entrapment rescues, as well as fire and explosion training.
Classes and workshops are expected to begin some time in the fall of 2022 at the Ohio Grain Safety Training Center in Napoleon, OH. The site off Oakwood Avenue already is used by the Napoleon Fire Department for various training programs for its full- and part-time firefighters.
Steve Queen, president of Advanced Safety and Compliance Services, LLC, a consulting firm in Fort Wayne, IN, says the grain safety addition to the training center was funded by $52,000 raised by a group of northwest agribusinesses. Donors include:
• Gerald Grain Center, Napoleon, OH.
• GGC Feeds, Archbold, OH.
• Farmers Elevator Grain and Supply, Columbus Grove, OH.
• Safety Made Simple, Olathe, KS.
• Edon Farmers Co-op, Edon, OH.
• Jewell Grain Co., Jewell, OH.
• Legacy Farmers Cooperative, Findlay, OH.
• CHS Insurance, Inver Grove Heights, MN.
Custom Agri-Systems also is donating a 27-foot-diameter corrugated steel grain bin for simulating entrapment rescues, a bucket elevator simulator, and a grain engulfment mobile trailer. The bin is to be built in the spring.
“This mobile trailer will be used to put on displays at the fairgrounds or at ag day gatherings to really express how much work it takes to actually perform a rescue,” says Napoleon Fire Chief Clayton O’Brien, who has been head of the city fire department since 2015.
Background
To at least some extent, Queen notes, the new facility in Napoleon replaces a similar grain safety training center that had been at a former Trupointe Cooperative elevator in Sidney, OH, in the west central part of the state. Workshops were conducted by the Safety and Technical Rescue Association (SATRA).
Those classes, organized by Steve Queen, had been held for about a decade but were discontinued in 2017. Cargill Inc. had purchased the facility in Sidney and needed the site of the workshops to expand soy processing operations.
O’Brien attended a SATRA class in 2013. “I noted at the time that a lot of the people attending the class were from northwest Ohio,” he says.
In 2014, Napoleon first responders took part in a successful grain entrapment rescue on a farm near Liberty Center, OH, where he put that training into practice.
After classes ended in Sidney, O’Brien and Queen had talked about doing something similar in northwest Ohio. The Napoleon department already had a training center for firefighters, and there was space to add equipment for rescue training at farms and commercial grain facilities.
“I grew up on a farm, and I’ve been around the farm industry,” O’Brien says. “I’m hoping to bring more awareness of the hazards to farmers and grain employees, and that could save a life.”
For more information on class schedules, call Queen at 260-740-1217.
Ed Zdrojewski, editor