Re: How decomposed is a human body buried in concrete for 40 years?

Greetings,
I had never even thought about the question you proposed, but it sure 
turned into a fascinating topic.
Putting it simply the body continues to decompose even when placed in a 
cement like coffin.
I remembered going to the Hoover Dam and listening to the tour guides 
speak about the hundreds of bodies buried in the damn. However, when I 
went to the Hoover Dam website, I was shocked to discover that this was 
Folklore. At any rate, I have included the story about the 
Hoover Dam, mainly, because it became a fascinating read. 
Because of the sensitive nature of your question I am pointing you in the 
direction of pertinent information regarding the answer.
By going to these 2 websites you will be able to give scientific evidence 
of what your character in your novel will discover when coming across a 
body entombed in concrete.

Workers Buried in Hoover Dam 

In Nevada a number of tall tales have become 
accepted as truth and have in some cases resisted all efforts at 
correction. Here is one of the best known: Myth #1: Workers Buried in 
Hoover Dam. This myth is the despair of Hoover Dam tour guides. Someone in 
every group taking the tour is sure to ask how many men are buried in the 
concrete of the gigantic dam. According to the story, on several occasions 
during the dam's construction in the 1930's a worker slipped, fell, and 
was covered by concrete as it was being poured. Unable to stop the cascade 
of concrete before the worker suffocated, supervisors had no choice but to 
allow the concrete to continue flowing--covering the worker and sealing 
him in the dam. This happened seven times during construction, according 
to the tale's most popular version. In 1986, Tom King, Director of the 
University of Nevada Oral History Program, interviewed several men who had 
labored on the construction of Hoover Dam that told him a number of bodies 
lie buried in it. "These stories were made somewhat plausible by the 
authority of the tellers, themselves dam workers, and by our knowledge 
that building the dam was indeed an extremely hazardous enterprise," 
according to King, "[h]owever, further questioning revealed that none of 
the storytellers had actually witnessed such a tragedy or knew the 
identity of any of the victims. This was not surprising: the tellers 
believed what they were saying, but their stories were folklore--there are 
no bodies in the dam." "The idea of workers forever entombed in the giant 
structure that they had helped build was so irresistibly poetic, so 
deliciously macabre," wrote Joseph Stevens in his award-winning book 
Hoover Dam: An American Adventure (1988)", that it became the basis for 
the most enduring legend of Hoover Dam, and article of faith for millions 
of visitors who down through the years would insist, despite the firm 
denials of tour guides, Bureau of Reclamation engineers, and historians, 
that the great arch was not only a dam but a sarcophagus."Actually, the 
dam was poured in relatively small sections, so about all a fallen worker 
had to do to get his face clear of the rising concrete was to stand up. 
Officially, 96 dam workers died of various causes, and 112 persons 
unofficially, but none were permanently buried in concrete.The closest any 
worker came to being buried was on November 8, 1933 when the wall of a 
form collapsed sending hundreds of tons of recently-poured concrete 
tumbling down the face of the dam. One worker below narrowly escaped with 
his life, however W.A. Jameson was not so lucky and was covered by the 
rain of debris. Jameson was the only man ever buried in Hoover Dam, and he 
was interred for just 16 hours before his body was recovered.A structural 
engineer interviewed for a Discovery Channel documentary on Hoover Dam 
argued that it would be sheer folly to leave a worker buried in the dam. A 
decomposing body would jeopardize the dam's structural integrity and risk 
the multi-million dollar project including property and lives downstream 
on the Colorado River.
 http://dml
a.clan.lib.nv.us/docs/dca/thiswas/thiswas02.htm


Go to the following website. This information is too sensitive to be 
displayed on the Mad Sci Network.
 http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/notorious/gacy/count_6.html http://ww
w.cix.co.uk/~sjbradshaw/baxterium/deepfuture.html

Thanks for taking the time to send in a question to the Mad Sci Network.

June Wingert
Associate Scientist
Bio Tech firm in Houston