Twenty minutes passed.

“We need men down here!” Tom yelled.

“We’re waiting on people,” a voice replied.

The makeshift partition created a shield around Will’s face, but it wouldn’t last long. Still, no one else wanted to take the risk of entering the corn without training or safety gear, until another rescue worker finally joined Tom inside the bin. His entry joggled the corn and caused it to start flowing again, knocking over the partitions. Tom scrambled to put the plywood back in place in the 110-degree heat. He was drenched in sweat in his insulated pants.

Ten minutes later a rescue crew from Rockford arrived. The workers specialized in grain-bin rescues. They had brought special plastic partitions that locked together and were designed to wedge into the corn. The crew hammered the four-foot long plastic walls into the corn with rubber mallets, creating a cage around Will.

The grain shifted below the surface. Each movement seemed to set off more corn falling from top the edges of the funnel above. It rained on the workers, and Will told them: “You guys are gonna die in here with me if you don’t get the hell out of here.”

There must have been a dozen rescue workers around and above him, or outside. He couldn’t believe how many were digging their asses off for him.

Meanwhile, more rescue workers sawed a series of pyramid-shaped holes into the outside of the bin to drain more kernels. Trucks below loaded up with corn and hauled it off to dump nearby in a big pile.

Will felt his right leg begin twisting in the shifting corn. It felt like it was going to pop at the knee. His lower spine throbbed with pain because of the pressure. With large industrial vacuums with hoses, the workers began sucking the corn out from the cage. Every 20 minutes the workers would stop, pull the vacuum away, and use a pole to knock down walls of corn that had caked around the inside of the hose. Slowly, the pressure began to loosen.

Soon, the grain was down to Will’s bellybutton. Three workers tried pulling Will out by his arms. But his legs would not budge. He felt like they might rip his body in half.

“Stop,” Will said. “Stop.”

They resorted to vacuuming again, dumping the excess corn through the manhole. Slowly, they removed enough corn so that his buttocks and waist were exposed. Then they wrapped a rope around his body and told him to hold on to it with his hands and pull himself up as they pulled too. Again, Will’s legs would not budge. Six hours had passed since Will had become entrapped.

With the vacuum, they suctioned more, until finally the corn was at his knees. The workers took him by each arm again. They pulled. His legs came loose. They pulled harder. His feet came free. Will tried to walk, but his legs felt like ribbons. The workers flanked Will, carrying him under his arms and shoulders, sprinting atop the corn toward the edge of the bin, where they put him on a stretcher and slid him through one of the holes that had been carved into the side. Rescuers on the other side grabbed the stretcher and lowered him to the ground.