Italy: Dairy owner crushed to death by falling cheese wheels

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Hard cheese wheels (symbolic image)

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An Italian cheese producer has been crushed to death by falling cheese wheels near the city of Bergamo in the north of the country. The loaves of the hard cheese Grana Padano, each weighing about 40 kilograms, had buried the 74-year-old Giacomo Chiapparini under themselves, the fire brigade said.

Previously, one of the ten-metre-high metal shelves with a total of at least 15,000 cheese wheels in the warehouse in the municipality of Romano di Lombardia had broken and thus carried away further shelves within a short time. The fire brigade spoke of a "difficult" operation. We had to clear away the cheese wheels and the shelves by hand," said a spokesman. It took a good twelve hours to recover the victim.

According to a report in the newspaper "Corriere della Sera", Chiapparini was working alone in the warehouse at the time of the accident. On Sunday evening at around 21 p.m., he tested a robot that turns the hard cheese wheels and cleans them automatically. When his family was startled by the noise in the hall, they alerted the fire department, according to the information.

Search for the cause of the accident

For a whole night, the rescue workers had tried to free Chiapparini from the masses of cheese wheels. On Monday morning, however, any help came too late, said the fire department spokesman. Around nine o'clock, the body of the man was recovered.

The cause of the collapse of the first of the shelves on which the large wheels of cheese lay for ripening is still unclear – but it is assumed to be material fatigue or a technical error, it said. According to the company, it produces about 50 Grana Padano loaves a day, a total of over 15,000 loaves per year.

wit/AFP/dpa