As frights go, it doesn’t get much worse in Southwestern Ontario’s farm belt.

A two-year-old girl, playing one minute with other kids, then suddenly gone.

The frantic parents, searching for two hours before they called police.

Darkness closing in.

The endless corn field nearby — 75 acres, its towering stalks packed at more than 20,000 plants an acre.

Wednesday, the 14-hour ordeal that confronted the unidentified toddler, and scores of volunteers who rushed to find her, ended with a neighbour spotting her in a bean field about a kilometre away.

There’s a reason most rural parents warn their children to stay away from corn fields, police said — a point driven home by the overnight scare that left safety specialists echoing that message.

“Any two-year-old, the trouble is they move so darn fast,” said Dean Anderson of Workplace Safety and Prevention Services, formerly the Farm Safety Association.

At its height, the desperate search for the girl on the Whelan Line farm in Huron County, north of London, involved more than 80 emergency response personnel — police, dog search team officers, volunteer firefighters and paramedics. Family and neighbours also joined in.

Reported missing about 8 p.m. Tuesday, the little girl wasn’t found until 10:30 a.m. Wednesday.

Overnight, an RCAF rescue helicopter from Trenton used its spotlights to scour the area.

With two million acres of corn grown in Ontario, much of it in the southwest, police sometimes get calls about children lost in the field but they’re often quickly found.

This was a much longer ordeal, said OPP Const. Kees Wijnands.

He said it’s easy enough for an adult to become disoriented in a corn field, let along a youngster.

“Playing near or in corn fields is dangerous, especially for young children,” he warned. “Some places abut a corn field. If kids are playing there, make sure they are supervised.”

What might have gone through the young girl’s mind overnight Tuesday, lost and wandering in temperatures that fell to 15C, wasn’t immediately clear: Police didn’t identify the family and kept reporters away.

The family, police said, were new to Canada and there was a language barrier, suggesting they don’t speak English. That could explain why they didn’t immediately notify police the child was missing, they said.

The real risk in this case was dehydration or exposure, said Anderson, who noted giant corn fields can easily swallow even livestock.

“You often hear it with cattle, believe it or not,” he said.

Cows will go missing, surrounded by food with no incentive to leave, only to be found at harvest time.

For humans, it’s a different story.

Besides the mature corn plants, so tall they easily dwarf adults, the other obstacle is the loud rustling of the plants. Anderson said a friend who lost his cellphone in a corn field tried to find it by calling it, but the rustling sound obscured the ringer.

For adults, Anderson said the solution to being lost in a corn field is simple — don’t cross rows. “Just walk with the row until you get to the end of the field,” he said.

“It was very tall and very full,” he said.

After a futile night trying to find the girl Tuesday, searchers began a row-by-row grid search Wednesday.

The corn “was very tall and very full,” Wijnands said.

It was clear the child had moved very quickly when she was first lost, he said.

The girl, apparently in good shape when found, was taken to hospital as a precaution.

“There was some very happy parents and happy emergency response workers,” he said.?

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