Regulations issued by the United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) specifically forbid this at larger commercial facilities subject to them;[6] most smaller farms are not.

Recovered bodies have shown signs of blunt force trauma from the impact of the grain; one victim was found to have a dislocated jaw.

[11] It has been likened to concrete,[12] cement[13] or quicksand;[14] and described as making it impossible to even wiggle toes inside a shoe or boot; one survivor said he felt as if an "80,000-pound (36 t) semi truck had parked on [his] chest.

"[13] The compression also makes it hard for blood to circulate, reducing the oxygen that gets to cells and increasing the amount of toxins in the system.

[7] In 2013 an Iowa man wearing a battery-powered mask that filtered out dust, a result of his asthma, was engulfed two feet (61 cm) below the surface of 22,000 US bushels (780 m3) of corn in an 80,000-US-bushel (2,800 m3) bin.

The respirator mask enabled him to survive, drifting in and out of consciousness for five hours until he was rescued by draining the bin slowly after efforts to pull him through the rope he was attached to failed.

Most grain storage and handling facilities are located on farms in rural areas, often distant from trained rescuers such as fire or ambulance services.

[1]: 10  There is at least one documented instance of a first responder requiring treatment as a result of such inhalation;[21] rescuers are advised to wear at least dust masks or even self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA).

[1]: 10 North Dakota State University (NDSU) advises farmers that as soon as an entrapment occurs, in addition to immediately notifying local emergency services, the workers at the facility be required to shut off anything causing motion in the grain, or close any outlet.

[15] Rescues of an entrapped victim usually entail building makeshift retaining walls in the grain around them with plywood, sheet metal, tarpaulins, snow fences or any other similar material available.

Feeling himself to be his town's "Bubble Boy", he did not return to work at the facility where it happened, instead taking a job at a local grocery across the street from the bin he was entrapped in, where the holes cut during the rescue were still visible.

[1]: 14  The University of Iowa's Great Plains Center for Agricultural Health (GPCAH) advises that any clearing of clumped grain be done from outside using a long pole.

This has not been found to be effective, as the grain's suction often pulls the victim under the surface too fast for them to reach it, and most are not secured firmly enough that they would not fail under the load.

[1]: 12 Agricultural safety advocates use different means to warn farmers of the danger of grain entrapment, since they believe many underestimate the risks despite having almost experienced it themselves.

[15] Many agricultural organizations and schools, as well as government agencies, publish and disseminate grain safety information, both as documents and videos, on the Internet and off.

[7][1][29] In 2019 the Illinois-based Grain Handling Safety Coalition produced SILO, a short dramatic feature film telling the story of a fictional entrapment and successful rescue of a farm family's teenage son.

"[15] Researchers in the field have called for those demonstrations to use only mannequins, however, noting that some training exercises have inadvertently turned into actual rescue operations.

[30]: 8–9  In 2018 several of them wrote an editorial for the Journal of Agricultural Safety and Health condemning the practice of allowing children to volunteer for demonstrations, which they had personally observed on several occasions.

"Each youth was in a position [where] a simple human error could ha[ve] resulted in suffocation with dozens of first responders present who would have been nearly helpless to extricate the victim in a timely manner," they wrote.

[f] The authors also took note of the likelihood that in the event of an injury or death arising from such an educational setting gone wrong, all involved would be held liable in a lawsuit.

The Purdue researchers attribute that to more extensive efforts to document those incidents in that state; based on annual grain production and storage capacity not only Iowa but Illinois and Minnesota probably have more.

[30]: 6–7 Farms in states in the Upper Midwest and West, where humidity is lower and smaller grains are preferred, report fewer incidents.

[1]: 2  Over 70 percent of entrapments have occurred on small or family farms of the type exempt from OSHA grain-handling regulations,[21]: 2  which account for two-thirds of U.S. grain storage capacity.

[30]: 5  According to Purdue professor Bill Field, entrapments in vehicles are particularly devastating for farm families, as 95 percent of the 140 deaths that occurred that way were boys under the age of 11.

[21]: 5 In Canada, CASA's Canadian Agricultural Injury Reporting system recorded 29 grain-related suffocation deaths between 1990 and 2008; however, the organization believes there were likely more due to the paucity of information available.

In 2015, it counted six deaths, including three sisters in central Alberta who were buried in canola seed while playing in a grain truck on their family's farm as it was being loaded,[34][35] and two rescues, based purely on media reports.

Purdue's data base identifies three deaths in Ireland, two in South Africa and one apiece in Saudi Arabia, Spain and Sweden.

[38] After a 2010 entrapment at a commercial grain elevator complex in Illinois killed two workers aged 14 and 19, while a third survived with injuries, OSHA assessed fines of over half a million dollars against the operators (eventually collecting little over a quarter-million).

A year later, after another incident in Oklahoma where two teenaged boys lost legs to a sweep auger, the agency proposed new rules on child labor in agriculture.

Several Democratic senators from rural states facing hotly contested elections, such as Jon Tester, Claire McCaskill and Debbie Stabenow, complained about them personally to President Barack Obama.