Mary Roach - Stiff

In the case of TWA Flight 800, Shanahan was on the trail of a bomb. He was analyzing the victims’ injuries for evidence of an explosion in the cabin. If he found it, he would then try to pinpoint where on the plane the bomb had been. He takes a thick folder from a file cabinet drawer and pulls out his team’s report. Here is the chaos and gore of a major passenger airline crash quantified and outlined, with figures and charts and bar graphs, transformed from horror into something that can be discussed over coffee in a National Transportation Safety Board morning meeting. “4.19: Injury Predominance Right vs. Left with Floating Victims,” “4.28: Mid-Shaft Femur Fractures and Forward Horizontal Seat Frame Damage.” I ask Shanahan whether the statistics and the dispassionate prose helped him maintain what I imagine to be a necessary emotional remove from the human tragedy behind the inquiry. He looks down at his hands, which rest, fingers interlinked, on the Flight 800 folder.

“Maureen will tell you I coped variably with Flight 800. It was emotionally very traumatic, particularly with the number of teenagers on board. A high school French club going to Paris. Young couples. We were all pretty grim.” Shanahan says this isn’t typical of the mood behind the scenes at a crash site. “You want a very superficial involvement, so jokes and lightheartedness tend to be fairly common. Not this time.”

For Shanahan, the hardest thing about Flight 800 was that most of the bodies were relatively whole. “Intactness bothers me much more than the lack of it,” he says. The sorts of things most of us can’t imagine seeing or coping with—severed hands, legs, scraps of flesh—Shanahan is more comfortable with. “That way, it’s just tissue. You can put yourself in that frame of mind and get on with your job.” It’s gory, but not sad. Gore you get used to. Shattered lives you don’t. Shanahan does what the pathologists do. “They focus on the parts, not the person. During the autopsy, they’ll be describing the eyes, then the mouth. You don’t stand back and say, ‘This is a person who is the father of four.’ It’s the only way you can emotionally survive.”

Ironically, intactness is one of the most useful clues in determining whether a bomb has gone off. We are on page 16 of the report, Heading 4.7: Body Fragmentation. “People very close to an explosion come apart,” Shanahan says to me quietly. Dennis has a way of talking about these things that seems neither patronizingly euphemistic nor offensively graphic. Had there been a bomb in the cabin of Flight 800, Shanahan would have found a cluster of “highly fragmented bodies” corresponding to the seats nearest the explosion. In fact, most of the bodies were primarily intact, a fact quickly gleaned by noting their body fragmentation code. To simplify the work of people like Shanahan who must analyze large numbers of reports, medical examiners often use color codes. On Flight 800, for instance, people ended up either Green (body intact), Yellow (crushed head or the loss of one extremity), Blue (loss of 2 extremities with or without crushed head), or Red (loss of 3 or more extremities or complete transection of body).

Another way the dead can help determine whether a bomb went off is through the numbers and trajectories of the “foreign bodies” embedded within them. These show up on X-rays, which are routinely taken as part of each crash autopsy. Bombs launch shards of themselves and of nearby objects into people seated close by; the patterns within each body and among the bodies overall can shed light on whether a bomb went off and where. If a bomb went off in a starboard bathroom, for instance, the people whose seats faced it would carry fragments that entered the fronts of their bodies. People across the aisle from it would display these injuries on their right sides. As Shanahan had expected, no telltale patterns emerged.

Shanahan turned next to the chemical burns found on some of the bodies.

These burns had begun to fuel speculation that a missile had torn through the cabin. It’s true that chemical burns in a crash are usually caused by contact with highly caustic fuel, but Shanahan suspected that the burns had happened after the plane hit the water. Spilled jet fuel on the surface of the water will burn a floating body on its back, but not on its front. Shanahan checked to be sure that all the “floaters”—people recovered from the water’s surface—were the ones with the chemical burns, and that these burns were on their backs. And they were. Had a missile blasted through the cabin, the fuel burns would have been on people’s fronts or sides, depending on where they had been seated, but not their backs, as the seatbacks would have protected them. No evidence of a missile.

Shanahan also looked at thermal burns, the kind caused by fire. Here there was a pattern. By looking at the orientation of the burns—most were on the front of the body—he was able to trace the path of a fire that had swept through the cabin. Next he looked at data on how badly these passengers’ seats had been burned. That their chairs were far more severely burned than they themselves were told him that people had been thrown from their seats and clear of the plane within seconds after the fire broke out. Authorities had begun to suspect that a wing fuel tank had exploded. The blast was far enough away from passengers that they had remained intact, but serious enough to damage the body of the plane to the point that it broke apart and the passengers were thrown clear.

I ask Shanahan why the bodies would be thrown from the plane if they were wearing seat belts. Once a plane starts breaking up, he replies, enormous forces come into play. Unlike the split-second forces of a bomb, they won’t typically rip a body apart, but they are powerful enough to wrench passengers from their seats. “This is a plane that’s traveling at three hundred miles per hour,” Shanahan says. “When it breaks up, it loses its aerodynamic capability. The engines are still providing thrust, but now the plane’s not stable. It’s going to be going through horrible gyrations. Fractures propagate and within five or six seconds this plane’s in chunks. My theory is that the plane was breaking up pretty rapidly, and seatbacks were collapsing and people were slipping out of their restraint systems.”

The Flight 800 injuries fit Dennis’s theory: People tended to have the sort of massive internal trauma that one typically sees from what they call in Shanahan’s world “extreme water impact.” A falling human stops short when it hits the surface of the water, but its organs keep traveling for a fraction of a second longer, until they hit the wall of the body cavity, which by that point has started to rebound. The aorta often ruptures because part of it is fixed to the body cavity—and thus stops at the same time—while the other part, the part closest to the heart, hangs free and stops slightly later; the two parts wind up traveling in opposite directions and the resultant shear forces cause the vessel to snap. Seventy-three percent of Flight 800’s passengers had serious aortic tears.

The other thing that reliably happens when a body hits water after a long fall is that the ribs break. This fact has been documented by former Civil Aeromedical Institute researchers Richard Snyder and Clyde Snow. In 1968, Snyder looked at autopsy reports from 169 people who had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. Eighty-five percent had broken ribs, whereas only 15 percent emerged with fractured vertebrae and only a third with arm or leg fractures. Broken ribs are minor in and of themselves, but during high-velocity impacts they become sharp, jagged weapons that pierce and slice what lies within them: heart, lungs, aorta. In 76 percent of the cases Snyder and Snow looked at, the ribs had punctured the lungs.