Suppose a woman were buried alive. She is buried in a plywood coffin, cheaply constructed. I don’t know the dimensions of the coffin, but it’s big enough to hold a 6’ tall woman with some wiggle room all around. The grave is 6-8 feet deep. The soil used is semi-dry, only loosely thrown onto, not too tightly packed in.
So my questions are: How much weight would be on the coffin? How much pressure would be needed to punch a hole through the plywood? Any possible way she could dig out?
I guess you’re referring to Kill Bill 2? I can’t imagine that being possible. Even trying to pull yourself out of a hole 3’ deep loosely packed is impossible. Dirt is heavier than people think.
I had a hard time finding an average density for dirt, but since it sinks, let’s assume it’s about as dense as water. If the grave is 2 meters long, 1 meter wide and buried 2 meters deep, that gives us 4m[sup]3[/sup] of dirt, or 4000kg. With that kind of weight pressing down, it might not be that hard for Uma Thurman to cause the ceiling to break by punching it. Digging her way out the way she did, however, requires ninja skills not seen outside Hollywood.
Even assuming that she could break through the coffin lid, (I doubt it) she’d suffocate from lack of oxygen before she dug through six feet of dirt.
I saw another movie with this theme that I liked. This guy’s wife poisoned him, but it didn’t quite kill him. (It was one of those poisons that’s supposed to make it look like a heart attack.) She buried him as quickly and cheaply as possible. He wasn’t embalmed, and the coffin was old and water-damaged. Also, it was pouring rain when they buried him, so the dirt on top of his coffin was essentially just mud. Added up, all of this allowed the guy to escape.
I’m still skeptical that the guy could escape before asphyxiating, but I appreciate the effort that the filmmakers put into trying to make it look plausible.
Guys, how about a spoiler warning here?
Anyway, a good rule of thumb is that a cubic yard of dirt weighs about a ton. So the 4000 kg estimate is pretty good. I’m not sure total weight is the issue, however, as you don’t have to lift it all – you just have to tunnel.
However, the fact that digging a grave means moving about 4 tons of dirt should make one skeptical of any movie that shows anyone besides a trained ditch digger digging one in the course of an evening.
The soil at the bottom of the grave is going to be tightly packed anyway, from the pressure of the soil above. It is not possible to fill a six foot hole with soil and have it remain “loose” from top to bottom.
The Mythbusters recreated a buried alive scenario with a modern steel coffin. The coffin started bucklingly and “leaking dirt” omniously enough for them to abort the experiment before they even finished piling up six feet of dirt into the plexiglass enclosed “grave”. I doubt a pine box would remain intact in the same scenario.
Wouldn’t mud make it harder to dig your way up (weight, consistency)? And what about breathing? It would be very hard to breath buried in dirt, wouldn’t it? Or did she dig up through six feet of dirt on one breath? As I recall, the hole was deep enough to require the digger to be helped out of it.
[spoiler]Buffy the vampire slayer also did this… sixth season opener, ‘Bargaining’ part two… but then, she’s commonly depicted as being somewhat more than human.
From what I’ve heard of ‘kill bill’, (never seen either half,) the same could be said of the bride.[/spoiler]
“trained ditch digger”? I spent a summer working for a landscaper - my training consisted of being handed a shovel, told to dig, then periodically being yelled at “Hey slacker! Aren’t you finished that hole yet?!”
Well, “training” as in getting in shape. I’ve had the experience of moving many cubic yards of dirt from my driveway to where they were actually needed, and if the average out-of-shape Joe were to move four cubic yards of dirt, he’d be feeling it the next day.
Although I have no doubt that there are some people who have to be told which end of the shovel to use.
My handy dandy Pocket Reference puts 1 cu meter of earth at about 1520 kg. Which makes 4 cu meters of dirt about 6080 kg. Or about 16,289.7 pounds. That Uma is one tough girl.
Parenthetically, during my landscaping days, I once had to shovel and move 3 yards of loam that had been dumped in the wrong place. I had a wheelbarrow, but still, moving 7700 pounds of dirt by hand made for quite a morning.
I don’t remember if I felt it the next day. Come to think of it, I don’t remember the next day…
Yeah, I’d hate to have a dig a big hole by hand now - I’m certainly not the man I was in high school. Besides, as you must know by your location, the problem in New England isn’t the 4 tons of dirt, it’s the 100lb rocks scattered liberally through it.
I had a real problem with this scene. It was just so completely implausible and impossible.
People generally have no appreciation for the sheer weight of soil. This is a prime contributor to accidental deaths of trench workers.
I was just speaking to a construction worker today who had four feet of soil collapse on him while standing up in a trench. He said the pain was unbelievable; he could not move at all, and it took 45 minutes to dig him out by hand. (Digging a person out with a machine is basically guaranteed to kill them.)
Here’s a report of a person buried under 5 feet of soil from this website:
No matter how much Kung Fu Uma was taught, it’s simply impossible for her to have survived. As a previous poster noted, the soil at the bottom is going to be fairly compacted just from the weight of the soil on top. Even if it were possible to punch through a pine box with air on the other side, adding five feet of soil on top is just ridiculous. Being buried by several tons of soil is invariably fatal.
Yes, but this was a Kung Fu Movie! (Or at least a tribute to one)
And in Kung Fu movies dedicated training gives you mystical powers:
The ability to jump and twirl high into the air. The ability to fight on treetops. The ability to do inhuman acrobatics. And the ability to do some super-twirly move that gets you out of 6 ft of dirt.
I’m going to put this in spoiler tags, even though the cat’s out of the bag-
[spoiler]I don’t think it was anywhere near six feet down. The guy that dug the hole was tiny, and the ladder that Budd pulls out of the hole, the top of which is visible before he picks it up, looks like it was maybe a 4 footer. Small enough for him to easily fling into the back of the pickup. Combine that with the depth of the coffin, she may have only had 2 1/2’ to 3’ of dirt to dig through.
Plus, she’s a kung fu master. That’s good for another couple feet of dirt at least.
[/spoiler]
I didn’t see the movie, but I’m having a hard time envisioning how you’d punch through anything from the bottom with that much bracing on top. Kind of like laying a sheet of plywood on the ground, kneeling on it, and trying to punch a hole through it. You couldn’t break and fold it out since the dirt is holding it in place (unless you can hit hard enough to explosively lift a head-sized column of dirt 6 feet high and break the plywood all with a 12" arching wind-up from your back). You’d have to find a way to crack it and let it cave in.
If by some miracle you could do that, the next thing I see happening is half a cubic yard of dirt immediately pouring in - probably covering your arm and possibly your face. Hopefully the plywood also hasn’t punctured your torso or face as it caved in under all that pressure (and you’d need a break right in from of your face to be able to sit up and tunnel out… even if you had a 2’ diameter open tunnel to the surface right above your pelvis you couldn’t contort your body enough to get either your feet or head into it to start climbing with the amount of leg room found in a coffin).
Then you still have to actually break a hole in the coffin lid - I sure can’t crawl through a 2 foot splintered wood crack 4" wide in the dark. No room to bend the cracked pieces of wood back&forth to open them up wide enough, plus all the dirt pushing on them making that pointless anyways. How effective a digger would you be cramped in a coffin flat on your back? Where would the dirt go that you tunnel out? What’s to stop your tunnel from caving in on you (and imobilizing you) since it’s freshly loosened soil? Waaaay too many problems with the concept.
No one has mentioned the fact that a kidnapper has done this in real life.
The TV movie “The Longest Night”
was based on the actual incident.
Too bad the kidnapped girl didn’t know her kung fu like Ms Thurman.
With all you folks doing these calculations, you can save a lot of work by going to one of my Ultra Calculators: http://www.1728.com/density.htm
It can solve for density mass or volume with input of 9 units each and output in 9 units.