When John Lawson found himself up to his neck in a grain silo on his central Queensland property, his first thought was, “I’m going to get bloody drowned in this bastard”. 

The 78-year-old Baralaba farmer said a “comedy of errors” made while emptying grain into a truck on Thursday afternoon led to the life-threatening situation.

Despite his immediate fear, Mr Lawson said he knew that if he wanted any chance of survival, he could not panic.

“I said to myself, ‘Hey old mate you’ve got to hang in here’,” he said.

“It was touch and go but I’ve survived things like that before.

“If I’d have panicked … it could have been different.”

Sucked into the void

When Mr Lawson was emptying the grain into the truck, he noticed recent rain had caused the grain to stick together and block the feed.

After a few attempts to unblock the grain from the base of the silo, Mr Lawson said he used a ladder to climb up to the top and stepped onto the grain like he had done many times before.

“The fellow that was in the truck that had come to get the load of grain, he handed me a piece of pipe about 2.5-metres long and I reached over from near the edge of the silo and I gave it a poke,” he said.

The grain sunk a bit, so Mr Lawson stepped closer towards the centre of the silo and gave it another poke.

“The whole thing just collapsed because there was an empty void in there from where I’d been digging underneath,” he said.

Mr Lawson said the man loading the truck had not realised he had fallen in, but it was lucky the truck filled up and the driver turned the auger off.

“If the auger had have kept on going for another five minutes I would have been under the grain,” he said.

“I was just in that situation where the grain was at the level it was at and when he turned the auger off and he heard me screaming he came straight up on top.”

The driver called triple-0 and a rescue operation was launched.

“It didn’t seem that long [before] there was ambulance vehicles by the oodles, there was mines rescue plus the police and they assessed the situation,” Mr Lawson said.

Risky rescue

Queensland Ambulance Service officer in charge Vaughan Mason said crews were forced to cut the side of the silo to release some of the grain so Mr Lawson could be freed.

“The main priority was getting him out of the grain and stopping the grain walls from collapsing in at the same time,” he said.

“Grain is very, very heavy.”

Mr Mason said there was a lot of risk involved in the rescue effort.

Mr Lawson said after an hour and a half in the silo, rescue crews managed to pull him out.

“Towards the last of it I was getting a bit toey, half-cranky … the cop said, ‘You just hang in there, we’re getting you’ and they were,” he said.

“They did a fantastic job, full credit to them.

“They worked like Trojans to get me out.”

Mr Lawson was taken to the Rockhampton hospital in a stable condition with a leg injury, where he remains.

Lessons learnt

Looking back on the incident, Mr Lawson said it was a reminder that no matter how confident you are doing something, things can and do go wrong.

“What I did I can probably look back and say, ‘Shit I probably shouldn’t have done that’,” he said.

“I’ve emptied thousands of silos and I grew a lot of grain and never had a problem, but the situation was slightly different.”

Mr Lawson said three more silos would need emptying when he was released from hospital, but he had learnt his lesson.

“I won’t be going in them, I’ll get the crane.”