When The Bomb Goes Off

[xoxoxoBruce]

Excerpted from “The Greedy Ones” by Michael Yon.

http://www.michaelyon-online.com/wp/the-greedy-ones.htm

During detonation of high explosives, the shock front can move through the explosives at more that five miles per second. When the shock front finds air, the air becomes a giant hammer: a giant hypersonic hammer. But this is much more than hypersonic. Hypersonic is a mere five times the speed of sound. This hammer starts at closer to twenty-five times the speed of sound, making it hyper-hypersonic. Even if a nearby person is untouched by shrapnel the concussion from the air is more than lethal.

When the hypersonic hammer hits a person, their clothes are first to go. The person is stripped naked. All the clothes are gone, but the victims never know that they are naked for a millisecond before being ripped to pieces.
The shock front becomes a violent sphere of annihilation. Birds overhead are blown apart in flight. On the ground, walls become as shotguns. When the blast wave finds glass and shatters through it, the shards and shrapnel from disintegrated window frames are drawn into the current, adding a gruesome dimension of lethality. For those people far enough away from the seat of the blast to escape the deadly blows of the naked hammer, the bomb-makers leave plenty of work for the surgeons, who must dig out the hidden glass and whatever other debris, including bits of dead victims, that are shot into the living.

The blast wave speeds down the road, tearing up anything in its path and using it like bullets and cannonballs. Even the naked hammer knocks people flat. Some die without being struck by solids. They are found afterward without apparent injuries, dead from internal wounds, from blunt trauma by air. But most victims are hit with solid objects. At the edge of the blast wave, windows continue to shatter further down the road; more bodies are lacerated, punctured, and shot by glass and stone as the wall of air knocks them off their feet and heaves them into the rubble.

Further down the road, the hammer weakens, the hurtling objects lose energy as the wave releases its hold on the cloud of debris. The shock front quickly lessens, rattling walls but unable to rend them from their foundations, plates fall and shatter while ripened fruit drops from the shaken trees, and the front slows down to the speed of sound and rumbles harmlessly off into the night, delivering only the message that something big happened. Then comes the brief silence. Darkness.

Now they come. The thuds. Always the thuds. Thump… bmmp, brakkk, thudd. Some of the objects come down like meteorites, crashing through roofs, while others fall in a steady downpour, like the baseball-sized hailstorms in Tornado Alley. Large projectiles continue to rain down, some a kilometer away.
Back at the blast seat, the fireball has long gathered and mushroomed and there is only the smoke and crackling of fires and the screams of the wounded and gurgles of the dying. The sirens begin. And then the second blast and a new hammer is unleashed, and some victims are swept away while others fall naked and tangled.

The bait and ambush is a common terrorist tactic. The first bomb summons rescuers and crowds, the scene swells, concerned citizens rush in to see if their sons, or mothers, or sisters who worked there, or had appointments there, or had mentioned they might be stopping there, were in fact there, and were hurt. Just at the time when many are poised to help, the second device is timed to explode.

I'd suggest reading the rest of the article.