Italian man crushed to death by thousands of cheese wheels

It’s no gouda.

A 74-year-old dairy farmer got creamed during a meltdown at his sprawling warehouse in northern Italy on Sunday night when thousands of wheels of hard parmesan-style cheese collapsed on top of him.

Giacomo Chiapparini, the owner of the eponymous Chiapparini cheese-making company in Lombardy, was killed in the freak accident when giant shelves holding the 90lb wheels of grana padano cheese suddenly buckled.

Chiapparini was using a machine to rotate and clean the cheese wheels at various stages of ripening when one of the metal shelves caved, creating a “domino effect,” firefighter Antonio Dusi told the news agency AFP.

The storehouse, which had been stocked with 25,000 cheese wheels, was left in shreds.

Thousands of 90-pound cheese wheels, arranged in stacks of 20, tumbled to the ground from long, narrow shelves — some towering at 33 feet high — burying Chiapparini alive.

An employee who was outside the warehouse around 9 p.m. local time heard a loud noise and called for help.

Firefighters and police officers raced to the scene in the town of Romano di Lombardia near Bergamo. It took the rescuers 12 hours to dig through the fallen cheese wheels piled high inside the cavernous 21,500-square-foot storage space.

After working through the night, first responders, aided by K-9 dogs, found Chiapparini’s body early Monday.

The cause of the deadly accident is under investigation, but Bortolo Ghislotti, president of the local agricultural district, suggested in an interview with the Italian news outlet Il Giorno that the machine used to automatically clean the cheese may have malfunctioned, leading to the disaster.

Ghislotti said that Chiapparini’s family is now in a race against time to salvage the precious wheels of cheese and transfer them into the climate-controlled warehouses of neighboring businesses before they spoil in the summer heat.

“The family, his wife Angela and two children, cannot understand what happened,” Ghislotti said. “But now we are looking for some colleague willing to keep all the wheels… which otherwise would have to be thrown out.”

Ghislotti estimated the economic damage from the accident at $7.7 million, which includes the cost of the machine used to rotate and clean the cheese wheels, which was destroyed in the collapse.

Chiapparini’s company sits atop more than 24 acres of land, which includes stables, warehouses, milking facilities and a ship. The farmer has been producing the popular grana padano cheese since 2006.

A neighbor described the elderly cheesemaker as a man who worked day and night to support his family. In addition to his wife and children, Chiapparini is also survived by his young grandchildren.