Scientists Challenge Claim That Mexican Students Were Burned at Dump Tim Johnson - McClatchyDC
go to original January 17, 2015

If a pyre were built to incinerate 43 bodies, how many tons of wood would be needed?

It’s a question that physicist Jorge Montemayor and materials scientist Pablo Ugalde have given thought to, and they have a precise answer: 33 tons. If tires were used for the pyre, 995 would be needed for incineration of all the bodies, they add.

The two scientists are among those seriously questioning Mexican government theories about the disappearance and apparent murder of 43 teaching-college students nearly four months ago, an atrocity that still roils this nation.

...In interviews, Montemayor and Ugalde said the students’ bodies couldn’t have been turned to ash and bone fragments at the Cocula dump.

“They might have cremated 10 people but not 40 or more,” said Montemayor, 66, a physicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

For one thing, the area where the earth shows evidence of fire is too small – just 26 feet across.

“It’s a tenth of what they would have needed to burn all the bodies,” Montemayor said.

For another, the amount of fuel needed to generate temperatures above 1,400 degrees F for incineration would have been enormous.

“You would have needed two trailer beds full of wood,” he said. He added that the area around the garbage dump, at the lower end of a ravine, showed no signs that trees had been felled to feed an enormous fire, or of ashes that a giant fire would have created.

Montemayor said that whatever fuel had been used – perhaps thousands of gallons of diesel – would have demanded a large number of men to transport it, then to build and feed the pyre. Such a pyre wouldn’t have fit in the confines of the dump.

Ugalde, an engineer and scientist who studies materials combustion at the Autonomous Metropolitan University in the capital, said incinerated tires would have left more than 2 tons of steel belts and wire, which were not found.

“If they didn’t use this quantity of wood or this quantity of tires, then it’s probable that (natural) gas was used. And who uses natural gas? Crematories,” Ugalde said.

Read the rest at McClatchyDC

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!