Okay, I totally believe it’s impossible, but I remember something like… Scully maybe, on the X-files?.. talking about the kind of tunneling that gophers and similar animals do whereby they displace the dirt as they move through it. Or maybe I read it as an “explanation” in some vampire fiction or something similarly ridiculous. Anyway, the idea sorta goes like this:
Oh, no! I’m trapped in a coffin! “Somehow” I tear through the lid of the coffin. I start tunneling and manage to displace dirt by filling in the empty space of the coffin. Hey, if the coffin is two feet wide and six feet long, that’s a decent tunnel.
Utter rubbish, I still think, but that was the “explanation” I remember from whatever fiction it was. Again, it was fiction, trying to create some kind of plausibility for a vampire, or zombie, or accidentally-buried-alive person. But it was a decent attempt.
I’ll see if I can google the source I remember. Maybe some plot outline will reveal my source.
The plywood thickness not being specified we can assume that it would either be too thin to support the overburden of the back fill or too thick to collapse and be very difficult to penetrate from within.
The entrapped woman would be SOL.
Sorry about that.
…I had to ask: how long does a body buried in typical American style last? On one of those history shows, they were trying to get some DNA evidence from a body that had been buried in 1920. They dug up the grave, and the metal coffin was in good shape-the lid was not buckled, and the hinges still worked. Anyway, they opened the lid, and the guy was perfectlt preserved! His face had patches of mold, but otherwise, he looked pretty good. His clothes (wool suit) were damp and rotting-you could see holes in the fabric.
I understand that embalmers used to use all kinds of nasty chemicals-arsenic compounds, bichloride ofmercury, etc… With chemicals like these, would all of the bacteria (that cause decay) be killed? Would this guy have lasted centuries (like the egyptian mummies?)
I know. I’ve buried dead animals(possum, cat) before and it takes hours to dig a decently sized hole to bury them with only an inch or two of padded down topsoil. And yet in movies, you have people who manage to dig coffin sized holes with a couple feet of topsoil in a rather short time.
Because watching people dig is boring. For a shockingly bad example of instant hole, fast-forward through Don’t Say A Word * (it’s certainly not worth watching. At least in Young Frankenstein* the characters complained about the amount of work it was.
hey, lets not forget that uma’s a pretty tall girl, too. six foot easy. i reckon if she pointed her hands like a diver and “dove” upwards through the soil, it wouldnt be too hard. nice calculations to work out the weight of soil on the coffin, btw. but its not as if the bride lifted all the soil out in one go, hulk style. she just wigled up through it, and as i said, uma’s fairly tall so it was basically standing up.