STREETER (AP) - You don't have to convince Alan Ruff how dangerous grain bins are. He nearly died in one last January.

The hole in the top of the elevator still is there - a makeshift window that was cut with a torch at the last minute to allow rescuers to shovel out sunflower seeds that had trapped him.

It was a close call, Ruff acknowledges. He tells his story somewhat reluctantly, wishing it never happened at all, but he hopes his brush with disaster might help someone else.

"And I can't help but think, with all of this corn coming in, that we have a lot of new storage that we didn't have before," Ruff says.

It was late October when the Ruff family finished combining sunflowers last year. Ruff farms with his brother, Ken, and their father, Harry. The family has grown sunflowers for 74 years and had cut back from a peak of 3,500 acres in the late 1990s to 1,200 last year.

The last of the sunflowers went into a 15,000-bushel bin the Ruffs had rented from the Farmers Co-op Elevator Co. Ruff lives in town, and the bin is only about a block from his house.

The bin is about 25 feet tall and 30 feet in diameter, likely built with Commodity Credit Corp. storage money.

"Most farmers fill them to the top and don't leave a ring of space. We didn't have enough flowers so we didn't have it completely full. That's why I was up there," Ruff said.

The flowers were put in the bin at 12 percent moisture - a few 14 percent - not exactly optimal, a bit less than the 10 percent moisture level that's best. The top of the seed pile stood about 4 or 5 feet down the side.

In retrospect, Ruff says he should have run the fans longer in the fall. He should have - could have - let them run 24 hours a day for 10 days, but probably didn't do that.

"We turned it off a little quick," Ruff said.

In the Ruffs' yard, they try to check sunflowers about every 10 days.

"That's a rule of thumb, but it's sort of weather-related deal," he said. "If it gets cold and stays cold, the grain is more apt to stay in good condition until it warms up the spring. But if you have a winter like last one, it gets warm, cold, warm, cold - you have what I call a heat inversion. You get frost and moisture built up, and that makes a crust."

Last January in Streeter started out with 12 days in the upper 20s or better - five days with highs above freezing. Then came a deep freeze.

The cold loosened its grip Jan. 17. The morning low had stalled out at 17 degrees above zero and by midmorning was inching toward 26 degrees.

Ruff and brother Ken decided to sell sunflowers, partly because of the storage conditions.

At 9 a.m., Ruff went to the bin and started augering seeds out from the north side. He'd pulled out about 150 bushels out when he stopped.

"I thought, 'I'd better go check to make sure we don't have a crust on top,"' he recalled.

Ruff switched off the take-out auger, but he left the tractor running and a semitrailer truck running. He saw a crust.

It was about 9:10 a.m. when Ruff entered the bin, up a ladder on the south side.

He had taken a shovel with him, and set about scooping pieces of crust out of the manhole.

He wasn't seeing the characteristic "funnel" form in the top of the grain, above the take-out auger in middle of the bin.

A chunk of crust came down. Ruff - almost near enough to the wall to touch it - laid his shovel aside to grab the chunk.

"That's when I went down," he said.

Ruff was up to his waist in shuffling, shifting sunflowers, but he thought it was no big deal.

"I didn't even get excited at all," Ruff said. "There were only 150 bushels out of the bin. I was dressed pretty warm. I'll start yelling. I figured it might be an hour or two before the guys in the (elevator) house would know that I was in here."

Moments later, things took a turn for the worse.

"All of a sudden, I felt myself slipping a little bit more, a little bit more … a little bit more. And now I'm up to here," Ruff said, pointing to his upper chest.

"Then I really started yelling - almost like a panic mode. You start thinking of your daughter, your family - this and that. Then, I told myself, 'God, if I'm going to die, I'm going to die. It's up to you.'

"I made my peace. I was thinking about how mean I was being to my family, because now I'm not there to help the wife out, the brother out with the farming. My thought process changed."

Just then, he heard a voice from above.

Scotty Mittleider, one of the hired men at the elevator, had heard Ruff's calls for help and had crawled up the ladder. That was a miracle in itself, Ruff said, because he knew Mittleider had a phobia for heights. But he had crawled 25 feet to the top of the bin, on one of the ladders only about a foot wide.

"And he'd crawled all the way up that ladder and threw a rope over toward me," Ruff said.

Mittleider's rope was too short.

"'Scotty,' I said, 'You've got to go get help, get Jeff (Williams, the co-op manager). Because I'm still sinking,"' Ruff recalled telling Mittleider.

Every time Ruff moved, more grain would come down.

"And that crust was up there," Ruff said. "I thought, 'all I need is for that crust to come down - even knock me out yet."'

Ruff told Mittleider that he would put his cap over his face to prevent the sunflowers from getting into his mouth and choking him. If he went under, he said, he'd hold his arm straight up, so that rescuers might locate him if he became submerged.

Mittleider went down the ladder and soon was replaced by Jeff Williams, the grain elevator manager, who had a longer rope. Now, Mittleider entered the bin and Williams stayed outside by the manhole.

"I wrapped it around my arm, and they started pulling and I thought they were going to rip my arm off," Ruff recalled. "I didn't budge at all."

Then Mittleider came in and held the rope while Williams went to call 911.

It was about 10 a.m.

Two other elevator workers entered the bin and started shoveling grain away from him. Soon there were four. Ruff started to think about whether his rescuers might become victims in the sinking sunflower seeds.

He told the men they needed to bring planks and ladders up into the bin to prevent a bigger tragedy. Boards were brought in.

Rescuers cut a hole in the side of the bin. They shoveled the sunflowers, man-to-man, out of the hole in the wall.

"I was still going down a little bit at a time," Ruff said. "But finally they could get the rope down underneath my arms, and I was close enough to a sidewall, that they took a Come Along (tool) and tied the rope to a vent."

Still, there was no pulling Ruff out - even with the rope under his arms. The men kept digging until only his lower legs were covered.

With one man still digging in front of him, three other men - pulling together - gave a mighty heave.

"I popped free," Ruff said. "The guy in the middle, I landed over the top of him. That's how hard they were pulling."

Ruff's position in the bin must have made a difference, he said, because the men around him somehow were able to walk out of the seeds even though they also were up to their knees.

"It's like a suction," he said.

Once freed, Ruff was helped out of the bin with a boom truck provided by Otter Tail Power Co. Officials said it took about an hour and a half to get him out.

In retrospect, Ruff says he made at least three mistakes.

"One, I didn't have a mask on," he said.

"Two, I laid the shovel down because a big chunk (of grain crust) came down, and I laid the shovel down to grab that chunk. Just when I laid that shovel down, that's when I went down."

Third, he did not have another person outside the bin.

He and other farmer friends wonder if somehow the grain had frozen at some kind of slant in the bin. When the air was turned on, he thinks some spots that did not freeze as much - or more - created a sort of slanted "tunnel" that made the grain drain at an unexpected angle.

"Even a couple elevator guys said, 'How come you couldn't get out?"' Ruff said. "They'd say they could jump into grain up to their waist and walk out. I say it was just like quicksand. It's sucking you down. When you jump on the grain, you're pushing it down; this was pulling me down."

Ruff can't say enough about the courage of people who rescued him. People made Herculean efforts to get there fast -from Streeter and from nearby towns such as Gackle and Medina.

Now, with all the new storage going up, Ruff worries. Corn and sunflowers are combined when it's cold, sometimes on the wetter side.

He thinks it would be wise for people to check bins more often, leave the air on longer and colder and remove some of the grain to take the peak off.

"The heat goes to the middle and comes up, and if you've got that crust, that's where the peak is going to form. If you take the peak off, you eliminate half the problem," he said.

One man near Streeter told how he nearly drowned in a 5,000-bushel sunflower bin.

Ruff thinks larger bins and capacities offer a bigger challenge - more chance of different loads with different moisture levels, more chance for heating, more crusting; more of a temptation to move quickly, without thinking.

"The safest, smartest thing is to overrun your fans," he said. "If you think it's dry, run it another day or two. And take the peak off the grain because that's where the moisture collects."