Modelling the blast environment and relating this to clinical injury: experience from the 7/7 inquest

Abstract

This paper addresses the computational modelling of a series of specific blast-related incidents and the relationships of clinical and engineering interpretations. The Royal Centre for Defence Medicine and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory were tasked in 2010 by the UK Ministry of Defence to assist the Coroner's inquests into the 7 July 2005 London bombings. A three phase approach was taken. The first phase included an engineering expert in blast effects on structures reviewing photographs of the damaged carriages and bus to give a view on the likely physical effects on people close to the explosions. The second phase was a clinical review of the evidence by military clinicians to assess blast injury in the casualties. The third phase was to model the blast environment by structural dynamics experts to assess likely blast loading on victims to evaluate the potential blast loading on individuals. This loading information was then assessed by physiology experts. Once all teams (engineering, clinical and modelling/physiological) had separately arrived at their conclusions, the information streams were integrated to arrive at a consensus. The aim of this paper is to describe the methodology used as a potential model for others to consider if faced with a similar investigation, and to show the benefit of the transition of military knowledge to a civilian environment.

last Overpressure Induced Pulmonary and Intestinal Damage is Ameliorated by Post-injury Decay Accelerating Factor Injection

“…HE explosions occur on American soil in both deliberate and accidental manner, i.e., HE explosions occurred at the 1993 world trade center bombing, the 1998 Alfred P Murray building/Oklahoma city bombing, and constituted the disaster of the 2012 city of West, Texas fertilizer plant. HE explosions are ever increasing in incidence on the global scale with continued blasts in Israeli-Palestinian conflicts and the threat of terrorist attacks in the developed world is constant: London 2005 [8,9], Madrid 2004 [10], and Moscow 2010 [11]. Blast injuries, simulated by the immediately sub-lethal yet tissue-damaging model employed in this manuscript, are a real and present danger with which few civilian physicians have experience in treating [12].…”