Italian man crushed to death by falling wheels of cheese

The owner of a cheese factory in northern Italy has died after being crushed when thousands of his cheese wheels fell on him.

74-year-old Giacomo Chiapparini, a local producer of Grana Padano — a parmesan-style hard cheese that is popular in Italy — was in his warehouse near the city of Bergamo on Sunday evening tending to some 15,000 cheese wheels that were aging. All of a sudden, a 30-feet high shelf holding the wheels, which weigh about 20kg (44lbs) each, gave way. This created a domino effect that sent the massive wheels flying and ultimately burying their maker.

Bortolo Ghislotti, a friend and neighbor 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 mold sent an alarm signal. Ghislotti said that after they fixed the problem, the son left the warehouse while his father re-started 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,” Ghislotti said. “He knows that if he got out seconds later, he would be dead, too.”