Two off-duty volunteer NY firefighters dead after plunge into manure at upstate farm
Two off-duty volunteer firefighters, including one who tried to save the other, died after falling into a manure tanker at a cattle farm in upstate New York, police said Friday.
Nathan Doody, 33, of DeRuyter and Tyler Memory, 29, from Tully, were working their day jobs when they fell unconscious and tumbled into the tanker after being overcome by noxious fumes emanating from within.
Cops said one of the men had attempted “to retrieve a piece of equipment that had fallen into the tanker,” located at Champion Farms in Clinton, only to pass out and fall inside.
When the other man attempted to rescue the first, he, too passed out and tumbled into the tanker, WKTV reported.
Farm staff who found the unconscious men inside the tanker and called 911 and paramedics took the men to a local hospital where they were both pronounced dead.
It was not immediately clear which of the men was the first to fall.
Memory, a third-generation firefighter, was a 15-year veteran of the Tully Joint Fire Department, joining up when he was just 14 years old, Assistant Chief Joe Nemier told LocalSyr.com.
Doody was a volunteer at the Cuyler Fire Department in Cortland County, first joining 10 years ago.
Nemier, who knew both men, said they had been employed as manure tanker drivers.
Champion Farms is a 10th-generation beef and dairy farm first opened in the early 1800s sitting on 3,500 picturesque acres about 250 miles northwest of Manhattan.
Manure fumes are known producers of toxic gases which can be deadly to both humans and livestock at high enough concentrations, according to the National Agricultural Safety Database.
The most dangerous among them is hydrogen sulfide, which can cause headache, nausea, dizziness and unconsciousness.
At high enough levels, hydrogen sulfide produced by manure pits can kill a person in just one or two breaths.
Three Ohio brothers died in 2021 after passing out from the fumes while working to fix a pump inside a manure storage pit on the family farm.
