Italian farmer, 74, crushed to death by thousands of falling parmesan-style cheese wheels
It’s no gouda.
A 74-year-old dairy farmer got creamed during a meltdown at his sprawling cheese warehouse in northern Italy on Sunday night when thousands of wheels of hard parmesan-style formaggio collapsed on top of him.
Giacomo Chiapparini, the owner of the eponymous Chiapparini cheese-making company in Lombardy, was killed in the freak accident when giant shelves holding the 90lb wheels of grana padano cheese suddenly buckled.
Chiapparini was using a machine to rotate and clean the cheese wheels at various stages of ripening when one of the metal shelves caved, creating a “domino effect,” firefighter Antonio Dusi told the news agency AFP.
The storehouse, which had been stocked with 25,000 cheese wheels, was left in shreds.
Thousands of 90-pound cheese wheels, arranged in stacks of 20, tumbled to the ground from long, narrow shelves — some towering at 33 feet high — burying Chiapparini alive.
Giacomo Chiapparini, 74, far left, an Italian cheesemaker, was killed when thousands of wheels of hard cheese fell on top of him Sunday. Grana Padano
A shelf at Chiapparini’s cheese warehouse broke, creating a deadly domino effect.Giacomo Chiapparini / Facebook
An employee who was outside the warehouse around 9 p.m. local time heard a loud noise and called for help.
Firefighters and police officers raced to the scene in the town of Romano di Lombardia near Bergamo. It took the rescuers 12 hours to dig through the fallen cheese wheels piled high inside the cavernous 21,500-square-foot storage space.
After working through the night, first responders, aided by K-9 dogs, found Chiapparini’s body early Monday.
The collapse happened Sunday night at a warehouse containing 25,000 wheels of hard grana padano cheese in the town of Romano di Lombardia.Il Giorno
It took firefighters 12 hours to dig through piles of fallen cheese wheels to find the business owner. La Repubblica
The cause of the deadly accident is under…
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