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Comment by jameskilton | Hacker News Reader

Well there's also the fact that kids bodies are much more malleable than the average adult body, and given that as crashes aren't expected, the kids won't be tensing up when they hit the seat and will kind of flop around a bit. Same reason drunk drivers almost never die in the accidents they cause. In most cases I would bet that the bus crash wasn't traumatic for the kids but something exciting they'll talk about for a while.

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"Same reason drunk drivers almost never die in the accidents they cause."

Unless you have some statistics to back that up, I'm going to go ahead and doubt that. Drunk driving incidences where neither party dies rarely make the news so we don't think of them often, and incidences where the victim dies but the drunk driver doesn't make better news than incidences where everyone dies. They stand out in our minds more as a particular case of some sort of injustice.

Furthermore, drunk driving incidences with fatalities where the driver survives generate newsworthy trials and sentencing which drives further awareness of this case.

I've heard that too: in the event of an accident, it's better to relax all muscles than to tense them up (particularly, I've heard this about whiplash). Why is that?

When taking a big fall rock climbing the advice is to relax, enjoy the fall and shout something. Animal noises are the most fun, expletives the most common. The shouting is to make sure you're breathing out as you fall onto your harness rather than breathing in, and to give you something to concentrate on so you don't tense up in fear.

I'm not really sure why it helps, but I can certainly say it does. I know that when I panic and go stiff it hurts more as my tense body hits the rock. Even when in a similar mental state, hitting the rock with a relaxed body is less painful.

Anecdotal evidence: My dad (around 50 years old) still has periodic pains in his hip from an accident 20-25 years ago because he tensed his legs, making them rigid and sending the force of the collision through his bones, shattering fragments inside his hip. To this day he still has minor bone fragments in his hip which presumably cause the pain.

My understanding is that when tense, you're more likely to resist the way your body is going to move, causing more injury. The forces involve are such that you can't actually make a significant change in where you're going to go, but if you tense up you may end up putting a lot of force in a little area. Like, say, you tense up your leg, which puts all of the force into your knee or ankle.

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