Looking at the traumas of the Ravine-4 hikers, we cannot avoid concept of high-pressure blast wave, brought to the spotlight by Boris Vozrozhdenniy. What is important, regarding fractures of the ribs observed for Luda and Semeyon, as well as skull crack observed for Thibo, Vozrozhdenniy offers mechanism of indirect impact from the blast. It was not the wave itself that crushed the bones. The wave threw the hikers on the stones in the creek, and the bones were crushed by the stones. The wave acted as a moving door of a giant press, while the stones acted as another, immobile door.
It's also important that the blast was not of a classic type, which is explosion of a bomb or a shell. For the classic blast we have abrupt and strong airfront, which can tear arms and legs, eardrums, etc. Russians offer the following illustration of a classic blast:
The blast, we can imagine for DPI, was of another type - volumetric explosion. A huge volume of gas burnt high in the air. This type of blast is illustrated by different picture:
Wave's strike from that 2nd type of a blast is not that strong, but I believe it's strong enough to damage eyes, so they do not keep long in place.
Additionally, I want to point that all speculations that when the hikers approached the ravine after leaving the tent, the ravine was full of snow, and they started to dig a cave, are groundless. The position of the flooring they made in the ravine indicates that there was little snow there, which allowed them to use the ravine as a natural shelter -- a trench, like many others where Semeyon used to hide himself during the War.
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