Italian cheesemaker crushed to death by wheels of his grana Padano

The owner of a cheese factory in northern Italy was killed on Sunday when 15,000 wheels of his cheese fell on him, crushing him to death.

It took firefighters about 12 hours to move the heavy rounds of grana Padano to reach the body of Giacomo Chiapparini, 74, according to news reports. The freak accident occurred when a 30-foot-high shelf in the warehouse broke, causing a domino effect that sent thousands of pounds of cheese tumbling, authorities in the small town of Romano di Lombardia said.

Each wheel of the hard, parmesan-like cheese weighs about 40 pounds.

A friend and neighbor of the victim, Bortolo Ghislotti, told NBC News that Chiapparini and his son Tiziano, 50, had gone to his facility after getting an alarm signal from a machine that cleans the cheese wheels, which were being stored in the aging room of the warehouse. After tending to the problem, Tiziano left while his father restarted the machine, NBC reported. “Tiziano told me he heard a massive noise, he turned around and saw his father buried under thousands of cheese wheels,” Ghislotti told NBC. “He knows that if he got out seconds later, he would be dead, too.”

In an interview with Il Giorno, Ghislotti, who is also the president of the Bergamo agricultural district where the factory is located, estimated that the accident had resulted in about $7.7 million worth of damages, including the cleaning equipment that was destroyed in the accident. He said an effort was underway among local cheesemakers to move Chiapparini’s cheese to other temperature-controlled storage areas before it grew moldy.

Chiapparini, who is survived by his wife, Angela, as well as children and grandchildren, founded his cheesemaking business in the late 1970s, CNN reported. Each year, he made around 15,000 wheels of grana Padano - aged between 12 and 70 months - using milk from the cows raised at the factory.