I wonder how many of these stories elude me:
A teacher is in critical condition after four Pennsylvania teenagers deliberately threw a rock from a highway overpass onto the windshield of her family’s car, police said.
The 8lb rock smashed Sharon Budd, a 52-year-old mother and breast cancer survivor from Ohio, in the head, causing her to lose an eye and inflicting life-threatening swelling on her brain.
She was injured as she drove on Interstate 80 with her husband Randy and their daughter Kaylee, 19, to New York at around 11.45pm on Thursday.
The boulder smashed through the windshield as they passed Milton and Mrs Budd, who was a front seat passenger, was struck in the head. Her daughter, who was driving, pulled over the car.
This is an alarmingly common prank. I remember hearing several cases in Maine growing up, and I’ve reported several here. The scary thing is that roads with overpasses tend to be very high traffic, and many cases high-speed roads. A thrown rock can pick up speed and gain a LOT of ballistic energy, and when it collides with a car traveling at a high speed the energy is multiplicative.
I’m not a physics expert, so I won’t attempt to diagram this, still if you are good at this stuff, let’s just say the given numbers are A) an 8lb rock, B) Dropping from the apex of it being thrown at 20 feet, and hitting a car 5 feed above the ground going at 70 MPH, what is the ballistic energy of the rock hitting the windshield?
I’m betting it’s a LOT more energy than a handgun round, and possibly more energy than a rifle round.
Still we focus so much on “Gun Death” that these common “Pranks” that often turn deadly are totally ignored.
Does that seem right to you?
The vectors are not aligned so the speed of the rock falling doesn’t matter as much as the speed of the vehicle. The horizontal velocity of the rock is 70 mph, because that’s how fast the car is going. 1/2 3.6 kg times 31.29 mps squared is 1762 joules or 1299 foot pounds.
Probably close enough to the real numbers. Still unless the car is a bus or a semi-truck with a flat windshield, there will be some energy transfer to the car through the curvature of the windshield.
Maybe someone can come up with a comparative kinetic energy chart that shows bullets as part of a bigger array of weaponry. How much energy can a clenched fist deliver to Grandma’s jaw when it’s wielded by a tough, motivated home invader? Maybe some of the anti-gunners will at least allow there’s some wisdom in that old saw about Sam Colt: God made men strong and weak, but Sam Colt made ’em equal. Thanks, Alan.
I think you mean elude 🙂
fixed, thanks!
And that’s how Repairman Jack came to be.
In layman’s terms, it’ll kill your ass… And they should be prosecuted for attempted murder!
Happened to my Mom ~35 years ago now, driving home from work on an LA area freeway. She was lucky really; she remembered seeing two middle- or high-school boys standing on the overpass as they tossed a concrete block into oncoming traffic – her, as it worked out. They tossed the block just early enough that it hit the hood of Mom’s car (breaking it into chunks) and then the windshield on the rebound, as it were. She lived, but the insurance ended up replacing the car.
The cops were sympathetic enough, and were honest enough to explain just how unable they were to identify which two boys on bicycles might be the one’s actually leaving the scene of the crime. Of course no one was responsible for adding some kind of fencing to the overpass to make this sort of act more difficult – until it happened to someone with the political clout to make it otherwise a couple years later. And then only to some of the overpasses that similar attacks had occurred from.
If terrorists were smarter than bored middle-schoolers, they would organize an attack campaign based upon this precise type of incident in any country they wanted to attack and then use social media to subtly influence people to rage at the “ineffective police protection” and “failed politicians” and the like. Fairly heavy trash items are free for the taking virtually everywhere. Turning empty bottles into fire bombs are only one of many easy, cheap possible embellishments.
Who knew egotistical psychopath YouTube posers would be the preferred enemy?