Being buried alive- it's one of the most horrific
things that can ever happen to you. Today we're going to find out
what your body goes through minute by minute in two of the most
terrifying buried alive scenarios in the world.
Scenario One: Coffin1 Minute In the first minute of being
buried alive inside a coffin your blood pressure is going to spike as
you begin to panic. No doubt your mind is racing with all the scenarios
where people were accidentally buried alive- and if you're a fan of
The Infographics Channel you probably know of a few by now. Horror stories
fill your mind of coffins being dug up only to discover the corpse's fingernails
embedded in the wood of the lid as they tried to desperately claw their
way out.
There's a good reason to be scared, if you’ve been
buried alive in a coffin you’re almost certainly not going to survive.
But there's always a chance, and if you don't control your breathing
you're going to greatly diminish your odds of survival.
The average coffin holds 886 liters, and the average
person's volume is 66 liters. That means you have 820 liters of breathable
air left- 164 liters of which is oxygen. The average human consumes
23 liters of oxygen an hour, leaving you with just over seven hours of
oxygen to live. But if you panic and start breathing hard you're going
to greatly diminish that time frame.
Minute 2Unless you're a Zen master, your blood pressure will
still spike somewhat, at this point you're probably taking in 25% more
oxygen than you normally would. It's going to take serious effort to
calm yourself down, not easy to do when you're trapped six feet under the
earth in a coffin.
If your relatives or kidnappers were cheap, you've got
a chance. If not, this is game over for you. Modern wooden or even
metal coffins are impossible to escape from once you've got several
thousand pounds of dirt sitting on top of the lid. But if you were buried
in a cheaper coffin the wood's going to be much more brittle, giving
you a chance of escape- and survival.
Press up against the lid of the coffin, a cheaper recycled
paperboard coffin or chipboard coffin will have some give to it. If the
lid is solid, try tapping against the lid of the coffin repeatedly in
random patterns until someone above ground hears you. The odds are slim,
but not impossible- graveyards typically have personnel that will
attend to a fresh grave for several hours after burial in order to
beautify it. You'll want to make sure that your taps are random though so
the sound of tapping is not mistaken for some kind of machinery or
industrial activity reverberating through the ground. Don't scream though,
as that will use up your oxygen supply.
Minute 3With you’re breathing under control, you'll now want
to escape your cheap coffin. First, cross your arms over your chest and
then uncross them so that each hand is at its respective shoulder- left
hand on left shoulder, right hand on right shoulder. Keep the elbows bent
and do a partial sit up by sitting up as much as possible- probably
only a few inches. Then, slowly grab the fabric of your shirt and begin pulling
it up and over your head bit by bit.
Minute 4With your shirt removed, now tie the bottom of
the shirt into a big knot, making it so that the only opening to the
shirt is at the head. Then put your shirt back on over your head-
you've effectively just made yourself a protective mask that will help you breathe
as you claw your way to the surface.
Minute 5Now is the time to use up some of that precious
oxygen. Start kicking the lid of the coffin with your feet as hard as you can.
The lid of a cheap coffin will likely have already partially split open
from the weight of the earth above your head. This will make it
easier to do your work as you try to break the lid open.
Minute 10Even cheap coffin lids are no easy feat to break
open when all you have is your feet and not much room to kick. The
physical exertion is greatly diminishing the amount of oxygen you
have at your disposal, so you're going to want to make sure you're kicking
hard.
Once the lid has split open enough, dirt will immediately
start falling into your coffin- stay calm! You're rapidly going to have a
lot less air to work with and you want to keep your wits about you as
the earth starts filling your coffin. Push all that dirt to the bottom of
the coffin by your feet, and once that has filled up, start pushing
it to the sides of the coffin.
Minute 12The good news is gravity is on your side; the
bad news is that if you don't work fast the incoming dirt can quickly
suffocate you. However, by steadily digging the dirt away and
pushing it to your feet and sides of the coffin, you should have enough
room to sit up.
Minute 15If you've made it to this point, you're in luck because
the soil above a freshly dug grave is going to be very loose. If it's
started raining recently though your luck has just ran out, as the
weight of the wet soil will make digging impossible.
Now that you're sitting up, you're going to start
worming your way upwards. Your t-shirt mask will help keep dirt away from
your face so you don't suffocate, but you're going to have to work
very fast as the amount of breathable oxygen you have access to be going
to rapidly diminish. It's done or dies time, you either dig yourself
out in the next two minutes or you die.
Minute 16Pushing the dirt over your head to the sides you
should be able to worm your way up. The loose dirt of a fresh grave
site is going to be very easy to dig through, so all that's left to
do is to push your head up and out of your grave and then claw your way out.
Now it's time to begin your zombie-campaign of vengeance against whoever
buried you alive.
But what if you were buried alive without a coffin?30 seconds
It’s happened to scores of people, such as those trapped in
mudslides or who may have run afoul of the mob. It even
happened to one American man whose entire bedroom collapsed into a
sinkhole unexpectedly.
You've been hurled into a hole which was quickly filled
with dirt. If this is the result of being buried alive on purpose, digging
yourself free is probably going to be pretty easy. But if you
got buried alive unexpectedly, chances of survival are slim to none.
In the first minute the weight of the dirt is going to
make breathing difficult if not impossible- even if you were lucky enough
to have somehow captured an air pocket. If you're six feet under
you've got nearly 4,000 pounds (1814 kg) of dirt pressing down on you. You
are now suffering from what is known as mechanical asphyxia, thanks to
all that dirt making breathing impossible.
In the first minute, your body continues to use up oxygen
that's in your lungs and bloodstream, and suffocation is briefly delayed.
1 Minute By now you're suffering from apnea, or the failure of
oxygen to reach the lower respiratory tract. Your body responds by
sending a mix of signals to attempt to force you to breathe. Given
that you've got thousands of pounds pressing down on you, this is going to
be impossible and the attempts to breathe are only going to cause the
dirt to compress your chest even more.
Your brain has begun to die after one minute without
air as bran cells are starved of oxygen.
1 Minute 30 seconds by now your body is suffering from oxygen
starvation, or dyspnea. Most people can maintain consciousness this
long without air, but if you're in bad shape you'll likely have
passed out by now. Your chest is going to explode in pain as the airway narrows.
Your brain is now sending out emergency signals to your body to try and
save your life, this includes the shutting down of non-essential processes
such as the metabolic processes.
2 Minutest this point unless you're a trained diver you've
likely already passed out. Your brain continues to scramble to save
your life by shutting down everything that's non-essential in a bid
to conserve oxygen. You still have a chance to live if you're dug up soon,
but the clock is ticking and every minute that passes means increased
risk of serious brain damage.
Your brain has already begun to die, but as of right
now the process is still reversible.
3 Minutes your organs have begun to shut down one by one, starting
with the least essential for life. Your heart is working overtime though,
trying to pump the blood around your body as the vessels constrict.
Your body is literally fighting itself- the heart thinks more blood needs
to reach your organs, but the blood contains ever decreasing amounts
of oxygen. To make matters worse, the constriction of your blood vessels
makes moving blood around even more difficult, which causes the heart
to beat faster and use up even more oxygen.
4 Minutes the human body is built to survive and it's an incredible
machine when you really think about it. The heart is the most
important organ in your body, and it will not stop beating until
there is literally no oxygen left for it to consume. To keep that heart
pumping though, other organs are being brought offline. Your brain
is notoriously oxygen-hungry, but thanks to the death of brain cells its
oxygen use is rapidly dropping.
Cellular starvation is in full effect across your body,
and neurons can no longer relay signals.
5 Minutest make matters worse, your body has been steadily poisoning
itself due to the inability to expel cellular gaseous waste like carbon
dioxide. All that waste sits in your blood, which still contains
oxygen but at concentrations far below what's needed to sustain life.
6 Minutes the heart and brain are the only two organs that
are pretty much still operational, everything else having been sacrificed to
try and save your life. However, now brain damage has become irreversible-
even if fully resuscitated at this point you will experience some
loss of cognitive or motor ability. It's impossible to predict which parts
of the brain will be affected the most by oxygen starvation so your
particular disability could vary. What's for sure though is that at
this point things get exponentially worse.
7 Minutes your other organs can be easily brought back online
if oxygen is restored as cells are repaired and rejuvenated, but this
doesn’t work with your brain. At this point you're looking at moderate
brain damage. The heart has begun to dramatically weaken over time,
steadily dropping its beats per minute. Now you would experience only
a dozen or less beats per minute.
10 Minutes Brain death is severe enough that resuscitation
is impossible at this point. The brain has been starved of oxygen for
so long that damage has penetrated deep into the parts of the brain responsible
for basic functions of life. Not only have you lost your
personality, but even the ability to conduct the instinctual processes
of life such as respiration. At this point you can be kept alive
mechanically but reversing the damage caused to your brain is simply
impossible with modern technology.
The heart flutters out its last beat and with no more
muscular activity your body temperature dips.
15 Minutes your body temperature has dropped well below survivable
ranges- you are now what in medical science is known as “cold and dead”.
However, if you've reached this stage and you have been buried alive
in snow or in extremely cold conditions- you have a strong chance for
survival. The process of rapidly lowering the body's temperature
can actually not just preserve the brain but greatly limit the amount of
oxygen needed by the body. People who have been frozen and suffocated
for hours have been successfully resuscitated with zero loss of cognitive
ability. The act of inducing hypothermia has actually now
become a modern medical procedure, and used in cases like severe gunshot wounds
or similar massive loss of blood. Medical science now has a new
term: “warm and dead”, meaning that an individual is not considered
dead until their body temperature has been raised and there is still no
brain activity.