Tests are based on this technique http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?249113
Parented shards modeled via Wave modifier - Circle and one axis direction.
Parented shards modeled via Dynamic Paint.
Brush type Particles (that gives me more natural feeling of shards behavior).
Nice test, yours are always amazing. Thanks for sharing
nice work!
Exactly the kind of effect you see in those disast eee movies breakdown. Very nice!
The only problem I have with it, is the lack of residual destruction. Is there any way to keep the rubble after the wave occurs? At the moment all the shards return to their original position after a wave mod goes through.
You can use dynamic paint with scaling torus-mesh as a brush like here http://vimeo.com/38450564. Just uncheck dissolve button.
I tried to use another way - plane with wave modifier as brush for “padre” displacement, but it seems it doesn’t affect “padre”. Hard to say if it’s a bug or too much combinations 
sometimes I have problem to let dynamic paint work in this Bmesh build. Usually I switched to edit mode and back, it helped me. But not now.
Totally first idea was create very specific animated texture via dynamic (tune it via nodes) and later use it as texture for displacement modifie, but modifiers doesn’t support image sequences in textures.
@vklidu: animated textures -a mov for instance- works ok in displace modifier for me,
need to check the Auto Refresh tick in texture panel to see it…
and very nice examples as usual!
ups - you are right - thanks
why I couldn’t manage It before . . . ? hm /:]