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Irish Man's Death Ruled Spontaneous Combustion
chrb writes "BBC News is reporting that an Irish coroner has ruled that a dead man was killed by spontaneous human combustion. The controversial finding is a first in Irish history. From the article: 'West Galway coroner Dr Ciaran McLoughlin said it was the first time in 25 years of investigating deaths that he had recorded such a verdict. Michael Faherty, 76, died at his home in Galway on 22 December 2010. Deaths attributed by some to "spontaneous combustion" occur when a living human body is burned without an apparent external source of ignition.'"
FIRST PO.. *poof!*
If the reason isn't found, either the investigators are not good enough, or the science isn't. Otherwise such an "explanation" falls in the realm of witchcraft.
Fermi claims another life and they pay off the coroner!
If I remember correctly, most of these cases can be explained by a slow burn (smouldering, such as started by a cigarette), using the human body as a fuel source, and something acting as a wick, like clothing or fibrous tissue.
Humans body contains about 80% of water (out of body weight). It means, if person weights 100kg (about 200 pounds), he/she have about 80kg (about 176 pounds) of water... and it's equal amount of water in litres (80L). Now all math geeks, wake up: How much energy you need to _burn_/_vaporize_ 80L of water?
I'll rest my case.
I looked into this when I first read about it. Apparently a disproportionate amount of "spontaneous combustion" cases are older people found next to fire places, this man included. I was not able to find details that would rule out an existing fire in the fireplace contributing to the cause, like an absence of ashes. It's speculated that these cases are people who had a stroke or heart attack while warming themselves by the fire, after which a small spark flies out and eventually smolders the entire body.
The first test of my DeathRay is a complete success! MUAHAHAHAHA!
I remember watching a documentary about spontanious human combustion in school during english class (about 20 years ago)..
Half of the class was spooked because it was such a weird topic..
I remember they discussed some deaths (showing burn marks on floors, carpets, ..) but scientifically there wasn't any explenation yet..
Anyone know if there's one now ?
Learn about pinball machines on www.flippers.be
It happens sometimes. People just explode.
link.
See that "Preview" button?
"The court heard Mr Faherty had been found lying on his back with his head closest to an open fireplace." ...
"He said Professor Bernard Knight, in his book on forensic pathology, had written about spontaneous combustion and noted that such reported cases were almost always near an open fireplace or chimney." ...
""There is a source of ignition somewhere, but because the body is so badly destroyed the source can't be found," he said."
The obvious solution is that his hair caught on fire; perhaps with some sort of flammable substance in his hair like an aerosol or hair gel and the damage was too great for forensics to pick it up.
I write professional videogame reviews! http://www.digitallydownloaded.net/
Except that humans are not particularly inflammable. Sure, the hair burns, and maybe a bit of the skin or clothing, but the huge quantities of water in the body make for a reasonable extinguisher. Perhaps, though, if you're loaded up with lethal levels of alcohol...
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
If your job is to figure out what caused something to happen, "I can't figure it out" is not success, but is at least a rational response. "It had no cause" is nonsense.
As mentioned above, it's often old people lying close to a fireplace.
the second half is drunk fat people, who don't wake up when their clothes are burning. Their fat melts, and the rest of the clothes functions as a wick, replenishing the fire with more melting fat. Why they don't wake up, maybe they're already dead, but that's pretty hard to establish when there's almost no body.
He's Irish, therefore, he must have been drinking, and he's 76, so was probably taking nitro glycerine for his heart. Mystery solved.
Now, does that make me a forensic investigator?
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Lemmings explode after shaking their bodies.
too much cider.
The best explanation I've heard is the wick effect.
The presumption is that the person dies of other causes, and then a lit cigarette or some other ignition source starts the process. And you're right, from what I've heard, a high percentage of SHC victims were known to be heavy drinkers, which would only add more fuel to the fire.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
It'd take an awful lot of energy for a human body to get up to ignition temperatures on its own. Most of the cases in our more superstitious days turned out to have cigarettes as an ignition source. I wouldn't rule out a defective electric blanket. Or pretty much anything that can make a spark around, say a wool blanket. I'm sure there are a lot of avenues of investigation we could follow before we go STAMPEEDING for "Spontaneous Human Combustion", Mr McLoughlin!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
... and it's a record!
That would mean no-one has ever seen it. I mean, this process must take hours, whereas to me "spontaneous" means they burst into flames. Is there any recorded incident of someone seeing this? Are all the victims alone when it happens?
Spontaneous refers to the lack of any obvious ignition source (except the cigarettes they smoked, or the fire they 'fell asleep' next to - but I digress). If an empty desk in my office were to start smoldering and eventually flames appeared that would be spontaneous combustion as much as if the whole thing suddenly burst into flame.
Maybe Tyler Durden went looking elsewhere for the fat to sell his soap and things went terribly awry.
Monstar L
Spontaneous does not mean instantly or quickly, it means something happening with no apparent cause or external cause, or someone doing something involuntarily. The action doesn't have to be over quickly.
if you're loaded up with lethal levels of alcohol...
That would never happen in Ireland.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Apparently another common factor in SHC deaths is that the victims tend to live alone. However, there is one freaky story in the Wikipedia article linked above.
Obviously that would have nothing to do the the wick effect, and there doesn't seem to be any corroboration of the event. Still... makes you wonder.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
So in Ireland, "spontaneous combustion" is just a euphemism for "unexplained combustion?"
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_human_combustion
Wikipedia seems to answer most of your questions. Read the accounts of the two survivors who were accompanied by relatives at the time.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
It's caused by a phenomenon called the human wick effect. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wick_effect for more info.
if you're loaded up with lethal levels of alcohol...
That would never happen in Ireland.
57 comments and only one joke about drunk Irishmen? Slashdot truly is dying. The fact that nobody has licked to a Family Guy clip from when Peter went there just nails the coffin shut.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
It's all the whiskey in him. Whiskey burns, so add a spark from something, anything, and poof a human Molotov cocktail. Don't tell the IRA, they might get some ideas.
Take the Red Pill.
Build up enough static electricity and you can see it even in daylight. Doesn't mean that you're about to blow up.
As a drunken Irish derivative, who is not precisely Irish but whose mother's family does (allegedly) have a castle over there somewhere:
I must hasten to admit that I have lit myself on fire many times. It has always been an accident, and I have so far always either been coherent enough to snuff the blaze, or able to wake up quickly enough to do the same.
I have no doubt that many another Irishman have had similar problems, and that a certain percentage of them were either too inebriated to adequately react or simply too dead at the time to respond at all.
Kid-proof tablet..
Exactly. Who knows if these events have anything to do with sponaneous human combustion.
Obviously that would have nothing to do the the wick effect, and there doesn't seem to be any corroboration of the event. Still... makes you wonder.
But she didn't combust. And if there was enough heat in the mysterious blue flashes to ignite her she probably would have noticed (why are my shoes smoking?). And if there was enough energy to ignite her, you would need something like the wick effect to sustain the combustion. And she'd need to be by herself or someone would just throw a bucket of water over her.
Considering the amount of charge required... no, they don't. Now, if you happen to have some gasoline vapours near...
Dozens of people spontaneously combust each year. It's just not really widely reported.
link.
I am officially gone from
From the article "Forensic experts found that a fire in the fireplace of the sitting room where the badly burnt body was found, had not been the cause of the blaze that killed Mr Faherty.". Yet we the investigator has no clue how the body could have caught fire. Geez.
to me "spontaneous" means
People who can't use dictionaries should DIAF.
You can't take the sky from me...
Is slashdot facing spontaneous combustion as well? I had to use https to load this page - attempts with http failed with the 503 / guru meditation / varnish error.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
This doesn't account for the accounts made by actual survivors of this phenomenon. There have been people who have survived the experience and could offer no explanation at all.
I have no insightful observations to offer except this:
We know that to "boil" does not require high temperatures -- just a substance which has a boiling point which is lower and/or an atmospheric pressure which is low enough to enable boiling to occur at lower temperatures. We also know that chemical reactions can and do happen at lower temperatures not necessarily requiring "heat" to perpetuate the reaction.
There have been cases of SHC where the clothes which the victims were wearing were largely unaffected by the reaction the body had undergone and the same for the other materials surrounding the body. So this insistence that there must be heat is probably the first obstacle to understanding what is going on. And "heat" is a relative measure in the first place. After all, a "rock" might be considered to be "frozen magma" and that regardless of its present temperature, it might be considered to be frozen if it is not in a liquid state. And relative to "absolute zero" I'm on frikken fire right now and so are you.
Sometimes to understand something, you have to forget what you think you know.
Don't "just throw a bucket of water over her". Its a grease fire!
There was one guy in Australia I think who had built up so much static charge he was leaving smouldering footprints in the carpet behind him, in a hotel, with plenty of witnesses. Here it is... http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4252692.stm?lsm
This reminds of that time I didn't make a Family Guy reference and people unconsciously thanked me.
+0 Meh
"Spontaneous Combustion" was put in as the title of the article, despite the specific denial of that term by the coronor. That's sensationalism in its most basic form.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
That would explain everything.
In most of the "spontaneous combustion" cases in the past, the victims have shared two important characteristics:
1) They were smokers
2) They were alcoholics
Combining a flammable liquid, lit cigarette, and someone prone to passing out--well, it doesn't take a genius to figure out the likely scenario in most of these cases.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
More fuel? How much alcohol, realistically, can you have in your body? I doubt you can really store even a liter of ethanol. That'd be two liters of vodka. And apart from what's buried deep in your GI tract, the rest of it is too diluted to be much of a concern.
Drinking simply makes you unaware of being on fire for long enough for the wick effect to get things going. I'm sure many elderly people have problems with peripheral sensing of pain, especially if they have circulation problems. They may well be not drunk and still on fire without knowing. My 30 y.o. friend had a (recently fixed) Chiari malformation, causing her to lose all peripheral sense of touch and pain, even deep pain. She looked like her hubby was beating and scalding her, even though it was of her own doing (no effing pun intended, please).
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
With the amount of possibilities, the fact that they would prefer not invest more time to really figure this out, and would rather just hash it up to spontaneous combustion, is pretty lame. I know 3 ways where you can burn the inside of a body outwards, and of which leaves no marks, but requires that the person have been close to alcohol, strong enough to combust near a flame. Once you have this, you need a catalyst and voila...
I will not say how, as these would leave me to feel responsible should any individuals use these techniques, but they do exist.
It's not magic, it's not ghosts. They just don't know what caused the spontaneous combustion. Just like in UFO's it's an unidentified flying object not an alien saucer they just don't know what it is.
I go out of my way to complicate the simple things, so that I can simplify the complicated things.
I've got a theory, that it's a demon, a dancing demon, no... something isn't right there...
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
... if a case of spontaneous human ignition were to be found. That would move my reaction from "ignorant Irish" court to "really, how could that happen?". BTW I cooked my oatmeal this morning using the spontaneous combustion of natural gas.
Nate
Why do they always measure volts but not amps? A police taser can be as much as 100KV. An average person in a dry climate could build up 40KV without trying too hard. 40kv at low enough amperages can be 100% safe for human contact.
40KV doesn't tell me shit other than that his sparks were jumping close to half an inch.
Now it's obvious that the amperages involved here were pretty high since he was burning and melting things. How safe is this situation for the human body?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
One time my Irish-derivative friend sat across the table from me at the pub, holding a fork over the candle on the table for what seemed like about 5 minutes. The fork started to faintly glow, it was so hot - and he then had to start quickly switching hands to keep it over the fire.
Finally I stopped talking and just said, "What the FUCK are you doing???"
And then he smiled, and he branded my arm.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I would be more likely to believe that bigfoot broke into his house and set him on fire.
a high percentage of SHC victims were known to be heavy drinkers, which would only add more fuel to the fire.
Even with a BAC high enough to kill you, it isn't enough to turn your blood into a combustible fluid.
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Of course they are all alone. If they weren't alone, whoever was with them would put the flames out before the fire takes hold.
"Except that humans are not particularly inflammable"
Sober humans. He was Irish, after all. (runs)
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Hmmm... Have we ruled out Blipverts?
Ask me about my sig!
Because static electricity doesn't have current to measure, so it it would be hard to quantify in amps, a unit of current? Once there is current, it is no longer static.
This could be a game in one of the Saw movies.
"I've made a little P4 Prescott server and implanted it in your chest. I'm about to post a link to Slashdot saying it shows the latest photos taken from a TubeSat. There's a knife on the floor in front of you, let's see if you can dig it out in time."
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
So there's no way to measure the difference between a routine doorknob zap and a guy leaving scorchmarks on the carpet and melting plastic? That sucks.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Well, yes. If someone sees the incident, then it can be rationally explained, so it will not be described as "SHC."
This doesn't account for the accounts made by actual survivors of this phenomenon. There have been people who have survived the experience and could offer no explanation at all.
Well, except for the fact that they did not actually combust, so we don't really know that what they reported is in fact at all related to the supposed SHC cases such as this one.
Sure this case (and similar ones) are pretty creepy, but what do you think is more likely: An old guy dies from a heart attack (or other mundane cause) and a spark from the open fireplace in the room (was he a smoker? maybe he was smoking at the time and dropped his cigarette onto his clothes as he fell) starts his clothing to smolder and he burns like a candle for eight hours *as has been demonstrated possible with pigs*. Or some mysterious non-physical magic thing happened to char him in the spot.
Heck, I would more likely believe that someone strapped him to a chair, and injected him with air bubbles to cause his death, and then carefully laid him out and started him on fire in such a way as to maximize the wicking effect and cover up his evil plans. Rather than any mysterious SHC. What was the butler up to? Does the good-for-nothing son listed in the will have an alibi? Was the victim getting too close to the evidence of the toxic waste dumping coverup near the local reservoir? Have I been watching to much CSI?
Right. You can build up a lot of kv. But if you're measuring amps, you're probably already dead.
I read a book years and years ago on various weirdness and the ones researching it had a pretty good explanation. According to their findings nearly 97% of SHC cases all have these things in common: 1.-They are elderly, 2.-They drank regularly, 3.- They were to some degree overweight.
Their theory was the right mixture of gases in the body plus body fat to work as fuel would cause SHC which is why it is so rare. but according to their research it was pretty easy to spot the difference between SHC and say someone who burnt to death by falling asleep with a cigarette. With SHC everything is covered by an oily soot (The body fat being burned as fuel), there is little to no damage to the surrounding area, yet the body itself is almost completely burned up in the center mass, often with bones destroyed.
Finally as for what sets them off their theory was electrical, which is as good as any I suppose. they based it on the one case they could find of someone who survived it in I believe it was the 30s, thanks to having her daughter at home. the daughter reported her mother appeared to have some sort of fit followed by an almost static charge making the daughter's hairs stand on end, finally a white hot spot appeared on her mother and began smoking. The daughter dumped an entire jug of tea on her mother and managed to get her cooled enough to stop it, although with heavy burns down to the fat layer.
anyway as complex an organism as is the human it wouldn't surprise me that if the conditions are just right someone could SHC. After all look at the cases we have of people doing feats of strength that should have been physically impossible for their size, and without doing major damage to themselves. If you looked at it logically they should have had broken bones, ripped muscles, etc, yet they don't because the exact right combination of hormones and chemicals released by fear somehow overcome their natural limitations. So given what we know so far about the phenomenon I'd say its at least possible but extremely rare.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
This article on CSICOP has detailed descriptions on several alleged cases of "spontaneous human combustion," and explanations for what probably actually happened in each one. http://www.csicop.org/si/show/not-so-spontaneous_human_combustion/
Was this one of those serious cases of an MFA, i.e. a Major Fart Alert (that went amok)?
That would never happen in Ireland.
You mean because the lethal level is different there, right? :)
The word "apparent" is the key here.
ball lightening forming at the same location as a person.
Probably just a jumping ember. That's enough to set someone immobile on fire... Good luck in finding any trace of it once most or all the body has burnt.
Phew, slashdot saves the day again. I'm sure none of the highly trained police and firemen thought of that..
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Exactly - it's not even close.
A blood alcohol level of just 0.4% is lethal. But for a water-alcohol mixture to burn at room temperature, you need something like 70-80% alcohol.
Someone will point a high energy neutrino source at him next week.
Have gnu, will travel.
The good thing is that watching CSI will give you a broader sense of potential natural explanations to what seems really odd.
And if the victim died or was unconscious before combustion will probably remain unsolved. If it was self-ignition, wouldn't there be more traces spread over the room while he tried to extinguish himself?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The amount of current/amperage is a measure of how quickly the charge can deplete. When you talk about the current of a battery, it's a case not of "how much current does the battery have" but "how much is it capable of providing when the contacts are shorted together", which is a useful concept. In the case of charge buildup on a human, the most useful current-like statistic would probably be the amount of stored energy. Once you know that, you can work out the maximum current that can be sustained for a given length of time through a given material. (The voltage would affect how much current would pass through a material of a given resistance, and the amount of energy how long it would be sustained for; even thousands of amps moving over a potential difference of thousands of volts won't do much if it only lasts for a femtosecond, as there's not that much energy dissipated.)
(1)DOCOMEFROM!2~.2'~#1WHILE:1<-"'?.1$.2'~'"':1/.1$.2'~#0"$#65535'"$"'"'&.1$.2'~'#0$#65535'"$#0'~#32767$#1"
I remember seeing this on "That's Incredbile". Dang, Cathy Lee Crosby was so hot back then, I am surprised she didn't spontaneous combust! http://www.celebs101.com/gallery/Cathy_Lee_Crosby/21276/cathy_lee_crosby_photo_7.jpg Though today, not so much.. http://im.in.com/connect/images/profile/oct2009/Cathy_Lee_Crosby_300.jpg
I think you will only get current during the actual discharge of the static electricity.
The current can be calculated by taking the resistance it goes through.
If you knew his capacity , you could probably calculate the charge he was holding ( Q = C. U )
Then , by measuring the time of the discharge, you could find out how high the current was at that time.
Slipping shoelaces ?
Sorry, that should be impedance, not resistance.
The higher the impedance, the lower the current will be , and the longer it will take to discharge.
Should be a fun experiment though :-)
Slipping shoelaces ?
> from what I've heard, a high percentage of
> SHC victims were known to be heavy
> drinkers, which would only add more
> fuel to the fire.
The average adult has about six quarts of blood. Assuming the density of blood is somewhat close to that of water, that's about 12 pounds of blood in, say, a 150-pound person. "Legally drunk" used to be 0.1% BAC so that's 1/1000th of 12 pounds of alcohol--about two tenths of an ounce. That's a very, very small amount of fuel. Even if you're five times over the old legal limit, that's just one ounce of alcohol.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Has nobody seen Blade here? The man was obviously a vampire.
Bow before me, for I am root.
... except the coroner, in this case, said there was no trace of any accelerants.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
OK, here goes: "Two Irishmen walked out of a bar..."
What? It could happen!
John
People will burn in pure oxygen without the addition of a combustible substance (an "accelerant") rather than an oxydizer. But the things around them would likely go up as well. It's the fact of a body burning without its surroundings being damaged that is odd. What if for some reason the man's lungs were filled with pure oxygen? Oxygen can be in homes for medical purposes. Or perhaps it could be let into a home by foul play. You wouldn't find the oxygen afterward, but if it's from medical use in the home you would find a cylinder.
Bruce Perens.
He probably drank too much Jameson and sat too close to the fireplace.
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed H
You could measure his capacitance...
This doesn't account for the accounts made by actual survivors of this phenomenon. There have been people who have survived the experience and could offer no explanation at all.
More people have reported being obducted by aliens. And about an equal number have had a jolly tea party with Mr. and Miss. Bigfoot.
Sometimes to understand something, you have to forget what you think you know.
Yes, giving yourself brain-damage is probably the best way to understand things. Screw those scienticians with their "Lurnings" and "Edumacation". All we need is ignorance.
Well, my point is the FIRST thing that needs to be forgotten is that "all fire is hot." It's not.
Did you take that derivative and re-integrate it with the dust from whence it came?
I suppose it depends on your definition of "hot". All fires produce heat. Some produce more than others. I'm not sure anyone would claim otherwise, especially not the experts.
He was brandishing a red-hot fork. My options were limited, and I was drunk enough that it didn't really hurt much.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Perhaps Network 23 is testing their Blipverts again...
Mod parent up - it's clearly a case of the quantity of charge charge held, the time factor of current being irrelevant
Indeed, the headline is misleading (shame on you BBC)..
How dare you
TFA only mentions that the ruling was simply that he caught fire for some undetermined reason..
He was flammable?
No one is claiming that people randomly catch fire with no external stimulus..
Can I be the first to make this claim. I feel it is my role in this situation.
Unfortunately this sort of thing is common at the BBC now..
You're common.
They have a nasty habit of picking one or two words that someone said and quoting them out of context in a headline.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Wow. Fork you!
I've never seen outward behavior with such permanence toward an unrelated person from an Irish-derivative. I do have a habitually-drunken German-derivative friend from whom such a random antic would never be particularly surprising, however.
Then again, most of the Irish derivatives I know are directly related to me, and we all seemed to spend most our childhood actively trying to quite literally kill each other before everyone moved away (presumably, for the prosperity of the clan) once they became adults. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of them was married (twice!) to the aforementioned German derivative.
Indeed, it might not be an accident that it is an alleged castle instead of an actively maintained one. It seems likely, based on my experience with this particular genetic group, that at some point they all fled in different directions out of fear of eachother.
Family Christmas parties are, needless to say, very entertaining.
Kid-proof tablet..
LOL, yes, from my experience with this particular Irish derivative, all of the clan members do better the farther they are geographically separated from one another.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Spontaneous Combustion... THE EASY ANSWER!!!!! Just put some hummus on it!.... LAWL!
I've always wondered whether neutrinos collision was at the source of such reports. Since our body is constantly showered with them and since they barely ever affect matter being so small, neutral, etc, then maybe the one time that it hits something, the energy released completely consumes the recipient.
JigJag
"The hallmark of humanity is the ability to move beyond sensory inputs" - Mary Helen Immordino-Yang