Italian cheesemonger crushed to death by avalanche of falling cheese wheels

• An Italian cheese maker died after a warehouse shelf collapsed, causing an avalanche of cheese wheels.
• The wheels of Grana Padano, a hard cheese that resembles Parmesan, weigh nearly 90 lbs each.

Tragedy struck Sunday night in an Italian factory when a shelf collapse caused a domino-effect of falling cheese, killing the owner as he was checking the ripeness of his specialty Grana Padano.

Giacomo Chiapparini, owner of the Chiapparini cheese-making company in Lombardy, had been tending to his Grana Padano, a hard cheese similar in style to parmesan, when a metal shelf buckled, sending the cheese wheels — which had been stacked 33 feet high and were worth roughly $7.7 million, according to the BBC — tumbling onto him.

The 74-year-old was crushed to death under the avalanche of cheese, as each wheel weighed approximately 84 lbs, BBC reported.

A warehouse employee who heard the crash alerted authorities. Firefighter Antonio Dusi said it took responding rescuers about 12 hours to find the man because they "had to move the cheeses and the shelves by hand," Barron's reported.

The president of the Lower Bergamo agricultural district, Bortolo Ghislotti, told the Italian news outlet Il Giorno the cause of the accident remains under investigation, but indicated the machine used to clean the cheeses may have malfunctioned and caused the collapse.

"The family, his wife Angela and two children, cannot understand what happened," NY Post reported Ghislotti said. "But now we are looking for some colleague willing to keep all the wheels… which otherwise would have to be thrown out."

Representatives of the Chiapparini company did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.