Silo

While silos may be dangerous, these facts are not.

A silo is a large storage facility used to store and/or ferment large volumes of loose materials, often in the agricultural industry, and they are most commonly used to store grain, wood chips, food products, cement, coal and sawdust.
‘Silo’ comes from the word ‘siros’, a Greek word, meaning ‘a pit to keep corn in’, and there are three modern types of silos, called ‘bunker’, ‘tower’ and ‘bag’, that store materials below ground, above ground, and in small quantities respectively.
Tower silos are shaped as a cylinder, and are typically made of materials of wood, concrete and/or steel and are unloaded by slides or grain elevators.
Bag silos are typically strong plastic bags that are long and laid on the ground and are significantly cheaper and less dangerous than a tower or bunker model.
Bunker silos are trenches or pits in the ground, sometimes with concrete walls, that are filled with the material to be stored, and then covered in durable plastic that is often held down with weights.

Tower silos are approximately 10 to 84 metres (30 to 275 feet) in height and 4 to 30 metres (10 to 90 feet) in diameter, while bags are around 2.4 to 3.7 metres (8 to 12 feet) in diameter and can reach lengths of 30 to 91 metres (100 to 300 feet).
There is evidence of bulk storage buildings, or silos, being used in Ancient cultures, including Greece and Israel.
Tower silos typically have ventilation to replace the toxic methane gas produced by fermenting materials.
American Fred Hatch, the son of a farmer, and his father Lewis Hatch are commonly believed to have invented the first modern tower silo in 1873, in the McHenry County of the United State’s Illinois, that quickly became popular throughout the United States.
Silos are highly dangerous, and people are killed annually, due to poisoning, suffocation or crushing due to gases and grain or machinery collapsing, with an average of 16 people each year in the United States, dying from grain entrapment.

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