Yes, that reminds me that
I went digging for exactly that information back in '07, and I didn't find a whole lot of it. Individual anecdotal reports of someone claiming that someone else's eardrums ruptured, that sort of thing was it, but nothing more. Nothing concrete, and for the 2 or 3 that I dug up back then, all isolated. Now, this is not to say that no cases of barotrauma occurred at all, but if the Twin Towers collapse was truly due to high explosives, I don't see how such reporting could be avoided. I know absence of evidence is not conclusive evidence of absence, but I still note that there's practically zero reporting of such injuries in any of the publications I went digging through, and I think the lack of widespread cases is in fact useable data itself, not merely "absence of evidence". T.A.M., you'll recall my posting of
that Morbidity and Mortality Weekly article (as an aside, what a macabre name for a publication).
Like you said, it doesn't tell us definitively that there were no barotrauma cases, but I can't help but compare that report to
this one from Emergency Radiology where barotrauma after the Madrid subway bombings were so obvious they were prominently mentioned. As noted in that article, barotrauma is classified as a
primary injury from explosions, whereas "bomb fragments and other displaced objects" are classified as
secondary. Perhaps I'm misinterpreting things, but when barotrauma is considered the primary sort of injury, and when the research behind such a classification extends back to World War II (my point being that there's much scholarship behind that conclusions), then I'd wonder why there's such a conspicuous absence of such reportage during what would arguably be one of the largest bombings in history i.e. the supposed "Inside Job" on the World Trade Centers. If you argue that the government suppressed the reporting, then you're finally talking about suppressing the work of non-governmental doctors and emergency care givers, since they were the data sources to begin with.
At any rate, I'm with you. I'd feel more comfortable if we could find some data that directly addressed the numbers and severity of barotrauma, but it just doesn't seem to exist. And if explosives truly were used, I don't see how the presence of such could go unnoticed; it would
have to have raised a red flag among the very post-event researchers you and I have linked, as well as among their colleagues studying this data. Despite the axiom about "absence of evidence", I feel this lack of numbers is indeed significant.