An Italian cheesemaker died on Sunday after being crushed by thousands of wheels of cheese in the ageing room of his factory in Bergamo, northern Italy, local authorities said. Tragedy struck when a shelf collapse caused a domino effect of falling cheese, killing the owner as he checked the ripeness of his speciality Grana Padano.
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He was tending to his speciality when tragedy struck
Giacomo Chiapparini, owner of the Chiapparini cheese-making company in Lombardy, had been tending to his Grana Padano, a hard cheese similar in style to parmesan, when a metal shelf buckled, sending at least 25,000 cheese wheels — which had been stacked 33 feet high and were worth roughly $7.7 million, tumbling onto him, BBC reported.
The 74-year-old was crushed to death under the avalanche of cheese, as each wheel weighed approximately 38 kg.
Bortolo Ghislotti, a friend and neighbour of the victim, told NBC News that Chiapparini and his son Tiziano, 50, went to the warehouse after a machine that cleans the cheese wheels from the mould sent an alarm signal.
“These machines clean and rotate the wheels, so when they find them even slightly out of place, they send a warning,” Ghislotti said. “It’s a common problem. So Giacomo and his son went there to adjust the wheels.”
Ghislotti said that after they fixed the problem, the son left the warehouse while his father restarted the machine. Seconds later, everything fell on him.
“Tiziano told me he heard a massive noise; he turned around and saw his father buried under thousands of cheese wheels. He knows that if he got out seconds later, he would be dead too.”
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Fire brigade team could only do little
The fire brigade was called and arrived within minutes. But there was little they could do to save Chiapparini.
“When we got there, the whole warehouse was full of cheese wheels on top of one another,” said Daniele Retto, a spokesperson at the local fire brigade department. “We had to call the unit that specializes in the search and rescue of people under the rubble, especially after an earthquake. They spent hours moving the wheels by hand, one by one, and found his body only in the morning.”
According to the company website, Chiapparini’s factory was founded in the late 1970s and produces around 15,000 wheels of Grana Padano cheese each year using milk from the cows raised at the factory. The cheese is aged between 12 and 70 months.
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