November
13
On November 9, 1970 a dead, 45 foot, 8 ton sperm whale washed ashore in Florence, Oregon,
where it festered for the next three days while the state decided just what, exactly, one does with a large dead whale.
A large, dead, stinking whale.
Engineers from the State Highway Department were eventually called in and tasked with getting
rid the overly-large rotting carcass. They couldn't bury it, because they feared it would just be uncovered. And
besides, that's a really big hole. They couldn't cut it up, because nobody wanted to do it. I mean, would you
want to take a chainsaw to a dead whale? And they couldn't burn it, which pretty much goes without saying.
So they decided the most logical thing to do was to blow it up. Obviously they had a different definition of "logic"
than I do, but I digress.
In order to blow the stinking, bloated carcass up, they packed in 20 cases of dynamite –
a half ton of explosives. That's enough explosives to renovate your house. They packed the majority of the explosives
on the landward side of the whale, hoping that the explosion would effectively blow the majority of the whale out to sea.
So
on November 13, 1970, the Highway Department backed everybody up a quarter of a mile and lit the fuse. And it blew up.
Boy, did it blow up. In retrospect, a quarter of mile wasn't nearly enough, and the end result was all the spectators
running away in terror from a shower of cascading whale blubber. Nobody was seriously hurt, though everybody was showered
with rotting whale parts, and one car was pretty much smashed flat by an exceptionally large hunk. To make matters even
worse, the majority of the whale was still there, though it was now blown into pieces small enough to be buried.
If
you've never seen the video, you really need to watch it: Boom!
It took the event 20 years to get national recognition, when humourist Dave Barry found a copy of the video
and wrote about it in his syndicated column. In 2020, the city of Florence dedicated a park to the event: The
Exploding Whale Memorial Park.
Since then, explosions have been used from time to time to dispose of dead whales, but the
engineers apparently have learned their lesson. The whales are hauled out to sea before they're detonated. All
told, though, blowing up whales probably should be filed under "Really Bad Ideas."
Work Cited
Sheppard,
Katie. "Fifty years ago, Oregon exploded a whale in a burst that ‘blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds.’"
13 Nov. 2020. The Washington Post: The Morning Mix. 25 Oct. 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/11/13/oregon-whale-explosion-anniversary/
