Combustion of an animal carcass for the study of human bodies involved in fires

Background: In a case examined by the authors two victims withevidence of thermal damages have been found. A key issue in theinvestigation was the amount of accelerant and the time of combustionneeded to produce the observed pattern of thermal damages. We carriedout an exhaustive library search without finding any published resultgiving a contribution to the case. Therefore we decided to carry outsome experiments using an animal carcass with the aim of highlightingthe conditions necessary to produce the observed thermal damages. Method:The experiments were carried out in a quarry using a pigcarcass, petrol and an electrical remote ignition system. Six tests havebeen performed, using different fuel quantities on different regions ofthe carcass, in some tests the skin was covered with a cotton cloth. Authors used healthy appendages in some experiments and huskedones in the last part of the study, because the response of the humanbody is expected to be in between the two tested situation. Results:The six tests carried out showed that the flame action and the timeframe necessary to reproduce an injury, similar to our case, on an animalcarcass is influenced by many variables including the different anatomicalsubstrates (e.g. the body fat) and the different quantity of petrol. In five outof six tests the flames extinguished before forty minutes.The time before the flames extinguish does not depend on the quantityof petrol but it depends mainly on the depth of the pool of flammable liquid (approximately 2–3 mm/min). The studies performed enabled us to de-scribe the deepness of the damages that in the last test, conducted with tenliters of petrol, reached six centimeters similarly to the victim’slesions.Only the third test, involving the abdominal area, showed a very longduration of flame due to the artificial exposition of the abdominal adiposetissue caused by the sagittal cut of the animal. The molten fat from adiposetissue contributed to the maintenance of the flame, lasting for over an hour.The damages in this test involved the internal part of the carcass. Conclusion: In the test conducted with ten liters we have produced thelesions closer to the observed thermal damages on the victims of ourcase, and the flames extinguished after 28 minutes.