- Kurt Kaser, a corn, soybean, and hog farmer in Pender, Nebraska, became trapped in a grain auger while working on his farm last month.
- He was alone on the farm and didn’t have his cellphone when his leg was pulled into the auger, which is a long tube with a screw-shaped interior.
- Kaser pulled out his pocket knife and cut off what remained off his leg below the knee. He then crawled to the nearest phone and called his son, who contacted emergency services.
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A Nebraska farmer had to saw off his own leg with a 3-inch pocket knife after becoming trapped in his farming equipment.
Kurt Kaser, a corn, soybean, and hog farmer in Pender, Nebraska, was transferring grain from one bin to another on April 19 when his left leg was pulled into a grain auger, a long tube with a screw-shaped interior.
He had been alone on his 1,500-acre farm all day and had misplaced his cellphone, according to the Omaha World Herald. It was then he had to decide if he wanted to bleed to death in the machine, or salvage what he could of his leg.
So Kaser pulled out his pocket knife and cut off what remained off his leg below the knee.
"I have had other incidences. I try to hold my cool or figure out how to make the situation better at the time," he told the World Herald. "It's hard to describe. You want to survive and you do what you need to do to survive, I guess."
Once free from the auger, Kaser crawled 200 feet to the nearest phone, inside a shed he uses as an office.
"Adrenaline kicked in so much that I don't know if it hurt or not," he told ABC News of the incident. "I had to Army crawl on my hands and knee and elbows, and kind of drug my back. It was about 150 to 200 feet on rock and gravel and stuff and [I] got to a phone to call."
Kaser called his son Adam, who called emergency services.
He was taken to Bryan Medical Center in Lincoln , and spent a week recovering in the hospital before spending two additional weeks at Madonna Rehabilitation Hospitals in Lincoln. He returned to his farm on Friday.
He said before the incident, he had removed a safety covering at the end of the auger to make room for it to fit under a grain bin during the winter.
"I'm kind of disappointed in myself that I didn't think of fixing that thing, or whatever. But that's why they call it accidents I guess," he said.
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