The tragic death of the two-year-old girl after falling into the grain mixer of a family farm in Saint-Lin-Laurentides on Friday adds to the heavy death toll in the agricultural sector, where 60% are believed to be children.
• Read also: Girl sucked into a grain mixer: a devastated community
• Read also: Saint-Lin–Laurentides: a 2-year-old girl dies in a grain mixer
On Friday at 3:30 p.m., police officers from the Sureté du Québec were dispatched to intervene in Saint-Lin-Laurentides, when a two-year-old girl was completely sucked into an agricultural grain mixer.
Family members tried to save the child before help arrived, to no avail.
When the police arrived at the scene, the death was pronounced.
Major crime investigators are no longer at the scene of the tragedy midday Saturday.
Faced with this tragic tragedy, the community is united to provide support to the family, but also to the first responders who intervened.
“The first responders who were there experienced a horrific scene. Nobody wants to see that. There are fathers, mothers in our first responders. Yesterday, the City contacted a team of psychologists to support the first responder teams. We think of the drama that the family must go through. All our thoughts are with the family,” said the mayor of Saint-Lin-Laurentides, Mathieu Maisonneuve.
Disturbing data in the agricultural community
The death of the two-year-old girl is far from being the first incident in the agricultural community.
Between 2000 and 2019, more than 285 people died on agricultural land, according to data from the National Institute of Public Health of Quebec.
As for deaths involving agricultural machinery, the INSPQ indicates 180 deaths.
60% of these deaths are children, which raises many questions.
The agricultural environment is a more dangerous place for children, where is the importance of ensuring supervision at all times.
“The farm is a living and working environment that is essentially in the same place. Children require constant supervision, they must not approach the operations and must not be involved in the work of the farm, “says the occupational health and safety manager at the Union des Producteurs Agricoles, Denis Roy.