I remember seeing a television special regarding the 1989 crash of United Airlines Flight 232, and the heroic actions of the flight crew in trying to control the plane's movements. A shattered turbine fan blade managed the near-impossible, and severed all three, redundant, flight control hydraulic systems: 100 people died in the spectacular crash, but 185 nevertheless survived.
Some of the survivors were flung from the cartwheeling fireball of an airliner into a field of corn (maize), and ever afterwards, they suffered from an unreasoning, irrational fear of corn.
These people here will also suffer from an unreasoning, irrational fear of corn.
Unreasoning fears seem to be in vogue. I may as well join too. So, in addition to unreasonably avoiding tongue piercings (see below), I vow to unreasonably avoid corn as well:
A grain bin collapsed and sent a tidal wave of corn into a home, sweeping it off its foundation, trapping a family of four and shaking the ground for miles.
One man was taken to a hospital after being buried for hours in grain and debris in Hillsboro in southeast Iowa.
The bin - about 100 feet in diameter, 90 feet high and containing more than 500,000 bushels of corn - collapsed Monday evening. The force of the grain broke the walls of Jesse and Jennifer Kellett's home and sent the roof crashing down.
"The force actually took the house with the corn and shoved it and crushed it," Dan Wesely, Henry County chief sheriff's deputy, said Tuesday.
The Kelletts and their children, Jordan Walter, 11, and Sheyanne Walter, 9, were trapped. Jennifer Kellett and her daughter crawled out, but her husband and son - pinned by walls, wood and corn - had to be rescued.
Many residents of the town of 200 said they could hear the bin's rivets giving way, sounding like machine-gun fire. Farmers miles away reported feeling the ground shake. The bin was about 20 feet away from the house, authorities said.
The grain bin is owned by Chem Gro. The bin was new, Wesely said, and officials are investigating the cause of the collapse. A telephone message left with the company Tuesday was not immediately returned.
..."The thing was they had to move this corn, and it kept rolling in. They had to move a lot of corn back before they could get down and find out what was holding them in. That would be the lumber, walls and different things," Wesely said.
..."When it happened, my house shook, and I'm clear on the other end of this town," Hillsboro resident Naomi Sanderson told the Hawk Eye newspaper of Burlington.
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