A question about the unexpected dangers of peat!

[Buran]

I’ve just finished reading Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith (good book btw!) but one passage in it made me wonder if the author is basing it on fact or just made it up out of whole cloth.

The basis is that the main character is caught in the middle of a rampaging wildfire on the tundra which is burning the peat in the ground beneath his feet, he comes across several bodies of others who had tried to hide in a cutting with horrible results:

@Martin Cruz Smith

"Some of them had apparently taken cover in a peat cutters shaft; now they were skeletons. Peat was an anerobic compost, organic decay so old that all its oxygen had been used up. Few microbes survived in peat - perhaps twenty or thirty a cubic meter. Exposed to air and water, the microbes instantly reproduced to many millions, a voracious pool of starved life that bored through flesh like lye. The walls of the shaft were gouged by efforts to escape this sanctuary.

Gruesome stuff, however I grew up in the countryside and we used to cut peat for fuel (still do in fact although its now automated and we call it turf) so I’ve worked with the stuff directly from the peat cuttings he’s mentioned and I’ve never heard of any effect like he described.

A real danger or something made up for the purposes of his story?

Thanks

[lazybratsche]

Few microbes survived in peat - perhaps twenty or thirty a cubic meter. Exposed to air and water, the microbes instantly reproduced to many millions, a voracious pool of starved life that bored through flesh like lye.

Sounds like utter bullshit to me. By the standards of big ungainly animals like us, bacteria can reproduce instantly, but still you’re talking a doubling time of twenty minutes or longer. Also, plenty of bacteria survive very happily in anaerobic environments. In fact, the flesh-eating infectious varieties tend to be anaerobic. But even the most horrific infections still take days to do really serious damage. Still, as far as I’m aware, the anaerobic soil-dwelling decomposers are completely different from the anaerobic flesh-eating bacteria that make bite wounds so nasty.

[Gbro]

I remember reading about several body’s found in peat bogs like this,
Google; body found in peat bog , and there are many story’s

[Quartz]

I wonder if you’re misinterpreting the passage? Hiding in a peat-cutter’s shaft wouldn’t let you escape the fire: the fire would progress down the shaft and you’d suffocate from the lack of oxygen. Then microbes would begin the process of decomposition, and a human body would indeed be a veritable feast.

[dracoi]

@Quartz

I wonder if you’re misinterpreting the passage? Hiding in a peat-cutter’s shaft wouldn’t let you escape the fire: the fire would progress down the shaft and you’d suffocate from the lack of oxygen. Then microbes would begin the process of decomposition, and a human body would indeed be a veritable feast.

I think you’re right about this being a likely explanation, but it isn’t the one given in the quoted passage.

Also, I suspect you’d find more than 20 or 30 bacteria per cubic meter virtually everywhere but deep space. (You’d likely have more per square inch on your countertops even after using a disinfectant like Lysol.)

[Buran]

@Quartz

I wonder if you’re misinterpreting the passage? Hiding in a peat-cutter’s shaft wouldn’t let you escape the fire: the fire would progress down the shaft and you’d suffocate from the lack of oxygen. Then microbes would begin the process of decomposition, and a human body would indeed be a veritable feast.

Possibly, I did wonder if thats what he meant myself but it does read like its the microbes that killed them and not the fire.

Thanks for the answers everyone, I can go back to cutting turf with nary a concern…

[Yllaria]

It’s plainly trying to say that the bacteria killed the people and it’s completely BS. I worked with an anaerobic digester, once.

1. a bacteria that needs O2 will die or go dormant in an anaerobic area - coming out of dormancy when the O2 came back, the bacteria will have a slower metabolism, not a faster one

2. bacteria that can survive in either anaerobic or aerobic environments take time to shift between the two modes - no sudden growth

3. fully anaerobic bacteria will be killed or made dormant by the addition of O2, so you’ll have several classes of bacteria turning off, rather than turning on.

All bacteria have an optimum environment, in which they will reproduce most rapidly. This includes O2 level, pH, moisture available, temperature, nutrient, etc. Exposing them to non-optimum conditions will slow them, not wind them up like microscopic springs of distruction. Putting them back into optimum conditions will cause them to flourish, but only up to their normal optimum level.

I can’t even begin to wonder what got misconstrued.

[Buran]

Thanks Yllaria, that makes sense.

So yet another scene in a work of fiction put in for effect rather than any resemblance to reality…oh well…