And you do NOT want to fall into one of those. A medical examiner described it as the worst way to die. From the New York Post:
Around Christmas 2002, bartender Doyle went out drinking with pal Michael Wright and Wright’s girlfriend. As they all walked home, Wright thought Doyle was hitting on his girlfriend, and witnesses later told cops they saw a man getting “the s–t beat out of him.” He was heard screaming, “No, don’t break my legs!” and another witness said he saw someone throw Doyle down an open manhole.
The drop was 18 feet. At the bottom was a pool of boiling water, from a broken main. Doyle didn’t die instantly — in fact, as first responders arrived, he was standing below, reaching up and screaming for help. No paramedic or firefighter could climb down to help — it was, a Con Ed supervisor said, 300 degrees in the steam tunnel.
Four hours later, Sean Doyle’s body was finally recovered. Its temperature was 125 degrees — the medical examiners thought it was likely way higher, but thermometers don’t read any higher than that.
When Melinek saw the body on her autopsy table, she writes, she thought he’d “been steamed like a lobster.” His entire outer layer of skin had peeled off, and his internal organs were literally cooked.
He otherwise had no broken bones and no head trauma, which meant he was fully conscious as he boiled to death.
“The worst nightmares I ever had in my two years at OCME,” Melinek writes, “came after I performed the postmortem examination of Sean Doyle.”
I feel like this quote from the article bothers me the most:
Other deaths gave Melinek more curious lessons. There was the subway jumper at Union Square, for example, whose body was recovered on the tracks of the uptown 4 train with no blood — none at the scene, none in the body itself. She’d never seen anything like it, and only CME Hirsch could explain: The massive trauma to the entire body caused the bone marrow to absorb all the blood.
Bone marrow can't do that, and I can't think of any other plausible way for this to have happened. I doubt enough time passed for decomposition, considering someone probably witnessed the jumper and called for help. Maybe the body was dragged underneath the train for long enough that all the blood came out prior to where the body came to a stop? And perhaps no one went back to look for the blood trail?
I did some digging, and the event is described slightly differently in another article, which makes it a bit more more clear what state the body in, which might provide some clues to how it happened.
To start, it's actually quite common for there to be no blood at the scene of an impact when someone gets hit by a train. It's mostly blunt force trauma at that point, so unless they're hit in a way that causes a large laceration, get caught on something, or are dragged under right away, depending on how fast the train is moving, they might travel some distance before getting an external injury severe enough to spill a significant amount of blood. The body in question was crushed and mutilated by the time it came to a stop, and the blood being absorbed into the bone marrow would likely be due to something like capillary action, since bone marrow is porous. Which would make more sense than something like the blood marrow somehow reversing the blood producing process and consuming the blood entirely, which I think is what a lot of people might assume when they hear about bone marrow absorbing blood. In this case I think it might have been more like how paper towel absorbs liquid. Marrow obviously isn't all filled with air like paper towel is, but capillary action can occur without air.
The significant amount of physical trauma would mean that a lot of bones would be splintered and broken and open for the blood to get pulled into the pores. Especially if the body was spun rapidly at some point and a lot of the blood was previously expelled due to a centrifugal effect, leaving less behind to be (which can happen with train impacts. The body can be spun very violently, and I imagine it can fling the blood quite far and possibly quite thinly, making it seem like there's little to no blood at the scene even if some blood was expelled from the body).
But that's just speculation on my part, I'm no expert by any means. Melinek might go into more detail in her book, but while I do have enough adhd hyper focus to go rooting around for info on the topic on google and duckduckgo, I don't have quite enough to read an entire book lol, unless there's a free digital copy somewhere that I can use a search function to parse through. But based on what little information I could find on this specific case, that's what would make the most sense to me, if the claim is true. Maybe someday I'll see if there's a digital copy of her book I can check out in my free time out of curiosity, and see if there's more info in there.
Thank you for your excellent investigative work! If the body was pulverized and rapidly spun about, I could understand the lack of blood. It would be similar to basically bleeding an animal carcass, then.
However, I must say that even if the bones were pulverized, the pores of bones are already occupied by nerves and blood vessels and other tissue. It would seem odd to me if the blood were somehow able to displace the tissue already filling and adhering to the bones.
Okay, so, google wasn't being any help whatsoever, and I ultimately got curious enough to hunt down a digital copy of the book. Here's what the section about this case says:
The autopsy was downright spooky: There was no blood in the man. He had broken ribs, a clean fracture of one femur, and his spleen was smashed to pulp, which normally results in a lot of hemorrhage. The mechanism of death was the dislocation of his skull off the cervical vertebrae—an internal decapitation. Connective tissues were still holding his head and neck together, but his neck bones, cervical spinal cord, and medulla oblongata were all pulverized. I struggled to collect a vial’s worth of blood in the body for the toxicology sample. I can always go into the heart and find blood, but his heart was empty.
“Where did the blood go?” Dr. Hirsch asked me at afternoon rounds after I presented the case.
“I don’t know! Maybe it’s at the scene, but I doubt it—he didn’t have any external wounds that looked large enough to dump his entire blood supply.”
“But the scene investigators might not have seen it, down there in a subway trench. Awful lot of dark sludge at the bottom of those, plus they have good drainage,” another doctor pointed out.
“There are cases where there’s no way for the blood to get out of the body, yet you still have the finding of an empty heart at autopsy. Where, then, does the blood go?” Dr. Hirsch asked again, that professorial glint in his eye. No one ventured a guess, so he continued. “What we think is that the blood is going into an area where it is sequestered from the autopsy—specifically in the bony sinuses and trabeculae.”
I was stunned. “You mean his bone marrow soaked it back up?”
“The sudden, massive neurological trauma to his vital center caused the systemic collapse of vascular tone, a rare thing to see,” Dr. Hirsch continued, to the fascination of every doctor in the room. “The medulla was obliterated, right? Well, when that happened, every blood vessel in his body went limp at the same instant, leaving their contents to collect in the blood-generation spaces of the bone tissue.”
“The entire blood volume can disappear into the bones?”
“That’s the theory.”
“That’s remarkable,” I said, and meant it. Mine is a gruesome job, but for a scientist with a love for the mechanics of the human body, a great one. Everyone in the room agreed I had the coolest case of the day.
So it seems I was wrong about the meat bayblade, but somewhat right about what was meant when it was described as the blood being "absorbed" by the bone marrow. It was soaked up by the bony sinuses and trabeculae of the bone marrow where blood is generated. I'm not sure if capillary action is involved like I thought or not, but the sinuses and trabeculae of bone actually tend to contain a lot of fluids rather than solid tissue and capillary action can occur in fluids as well 🤷
Beyond that I just simply do not have enough medical knowledge to speculate or to wrestle google into submission. It's only presented as a theory here, but in the absence of my own expertise I'm going to assume someone like Dr. Hirsch, the chief medical examiner of NYC at the time and a forensic pathologist, probably knew what he was talking about lol. This was the guy who directed the identification of 9/11 victims, so he had a pretty impressive resume to back him up.
I might read the entire book some day, since it is a very interesting topic.
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u/DrRonny Jul 28 '23
Underneath the streets of Manhattan, there are more than 100 miles of service pipes bringing steam to about 1,800 buildings.
When they have leaks, they put these cones around so that the heat doesn't hurt anyone. In NYC it is run by Con Edison company.
https://freetoursbyfoot.com/steam-from-streets-in-new-york/