What Really Happens to Your Body When You Fall Into a Vat of Acid

When construction worker Rob Nuckols jumped 40 feet through a dilapidated roof into a vat of acid used to clean steel to save a co-worker, he got first hand-hand knowledge of how your body reacts to acid. The tank contained a 40- to 70- percent nitric acid solution, and after Nuckols was pulled out of the acid, he was bright red and suffering burns on his legs and abdomen. And that's just from less than a minute of full-body contact with the acid. 

After falling into an acidic hot spring at Yellowstone National Park in 2016, Colin Nathaniel Scott's body completely dissolved. Scott and his sister were visiting the park when he slipped and fell into a hot spring in the Norris Geyser Basin. His sister called the accident in to forest rangers, but they refrained from trying to go into the spring to rescue him because of the "extreme nature and futility of it all." It wasn't just the high acidity of the water that kept the rangers from trying to find what was left of Scott's body, it was also the extreme heat - those two things together are a perfect recipe for making a body disappear. 

In a study to determine which kinds of acid are most likely to be used to dissolve a body after a crime, the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology in Karnataka, India, submerged teeth into various types of acid.

The gang at the DoEaMP submerged teeth in 25 ml of hydrochloric acid, sulphuric acid, and nitric acid, and as it turns out, after removing the teeth from each solution of acid, it was possible to determine how long each tooth had been immersed in the solution, unless the tooth was dropped into 65% nitric acid, or 37% hydrochloric acid. In those cases, the tooth was entirely dissolve after 15 hours. 

Obviously the last thing you want to do is get acid of any kind on your skin, especially any kind of concentrated acid. Concentrated acid heats up any amount of water that it's mixed with, meaning that if you get hit with acid, the 60% of your body that's made up of water is immediately burned. Your skin, on the other hand, shrivels and swells into tight clumps. It only takes seconds after the attack for the skin to swell, contract, and to shrink up to about the half the size of what it normally is.

If you do get acid on your skin, you need to wash it off with as much water as possible: the less you use, the less the acid is diluted, and the more it burns. 

When Karenina Longe was tricked into drinking a glass of "almost neat" acid by her ex-boyfriend in 2000, the drain cleaner took less than 20 minutes to burn through her stomach walls and destroy her internal organs. When you pour drain cleaner into your sink or tub, it starts a chemical reaction whenever it meets with water and begins to heat up to an unbearable degree and dissolve anything in its way. That's what happened to Longe. Even though she was finally admitted to a hospital after the attack, there was nothing that could be done to save her life. 

Eighteen-year-old Fernando Jimenez Gonzalez was working at the Coastal Circuits Factory in Redwood City, California, when the acidic fumes from the waist-high vat that Gonzalez was working with knocked him out and made him fall face-forward into the vat, where he drowned. The saddest part of this story is that Gonzalez's father discovered his son's body at the plant when he didn't come home after his shift.