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Explosions can kill people either directly or due to secondary injuries. For example, an ammunition explosion causes injuries that can tear through body tissues, causing instant death. However, many of their injuries are insidious, causing irreparable body tissue damage that may not be apparent to the naked eye.
How an Explosion Causes Injury
Death by an explosion is usually the result of numerous chemical and mechanical processes that all converge to cause significant injuries that result in death.
Generally, explosions are grouped according to the type of injuries they cause. These injury types can be classified as primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary. Different kinds of explosions share some similarities in their mode of causing injury—their mechanism of action. A victim of an explosion may suffer the effects of all four types of injuries simultaneously. However, this is rare. Usually, the victim suffers one or two types of explosion injuries. Of course, other factors also dictate the type of injury suffered. For instance, a victim suffers primary injury only if they are close enough to the explosion’s point of origin or within a certain range of it.
Things like burns or radiation exposure constitute quaternary injuries. A tertiary injury is what most people think should happen during an explosion; someone gets blown across a room and injures their back. This is also rare, at least in the way it plays out. Usually, getting blown across a room due to an explosion means certain death.
Secondary injuries due to an explosion are the typical things you’d expect; deep cuts, amputations, and other forms of visible trauma due to shrapnel and bomb casings.
Primary injuries may not cause the horrifying injuries you expect to see after a blast. However, they’re insidious, killing victims instantly without the outward signs of trauma. Primary injuries are caused by complex physical and chemical phenomena that are intrinsic to the nature of many explosions—a shock wave. Understanding the concept of a shock wave helps one appreciate the mechanism by which it causes injury and death.
Mechanics of a Shock Wave
A shock wave is a type of physical phenomenon that moves faster than sound in a particular medium. For example, sound moves through air at an incredible speed of over 1,200 Km per hour. A shock wave would move at a much faster speed than this, causing mechanical disturbances that can affect physical objects.
The origin of a shock wave is best explained using the analogy of billiard balls on a massive table.
A player uses a cue to hit the cue ball. The cue ball moves outwards, hitting a 4-ball. The cue ball transmits some of its mechanical energy to the 4-ball. Each of the 4 balls now moves forward, taking the transferred energy from the cue ball while generating their own. They move outwards, hitting the closest balls in their path. From the initial impact of the cue ball, subsequent movements are in an outward pattern. While there is a continuous forward motion, each ball travels only a slight distance across the billiard table. With each subsequent collision, the motion gets passed outward to create a leading edge.
The cue ball analogy exemplifies the path of a sound wave. Sound, from its origin point, travels outwards. Regardless of the medium through which it is traveling, each molecule of the medium transfers sound energy to the next molecule. This pattern grows in reach but decays in strength. Eventually, this sequence of events reaches a target, be it an ear or a solid object.
A shock wave follows the same pattern of events, only at a much higher speed. As with the cue ball analogy, a disturbance starts at a point of origin—the explosion. The air molecules transfer their energy to their neighboring molecules in a much more violent and faster pattern. This phenomenon leaves no time for the gaseous products of the explosion to expand outwardly in a normal way. The creation of hyper-pressurized gases at this stage of the explosion, and their sudden and violent expansion all at once, create a physical phenomenon that causes the kind of intense shearing forces that produce devastation in human tissues. It helps to think of this phenomenon as a car that accelerates from zero to 60 miles an hour in zero seconds.
The shock wave created by an explosion produces the kind of pressure that disintegrates things in its path. For example, it can turn the human brain and other body tissues into jelly. It’s like the shock wave shakes the human brain so violently that its cells quickly lose their structural integrity and crumble.
Ultimately, an explosion produces a series of events, whether visible or otherwise, that cause significant bodily harm as to cause death.
