These posts make more sense when read in order.
Much of what washes up on shore is trash that people have dumped in the ocean, but sometimes it’s deceased sea creatures. While the sea is very good at disposing of its dead—since it quickly becomes food for many sea animals—occasionally carcasses are thrown up onshore. That can be particularly unpleasant when it is pungent. Rotting seaweed can be smelly, but dead whales can be a real problem.
Now, disposing of something this size is very difficult. The first thing to try is to drag it back out to sea, but that wouldn’t work in this case, and it might just float right back to shore. Burying it would be difficult and it could resurface when the sands shift. Things buried on a beach resurface sooner or later. They couldn’t find anyone willing to cut it up and they thought it wouldn’t burn.
When the highway department runs into an immovable object, such as a hill, when they’re building a road, they usually blow it up. A little explosive can move rock and break up boulders so they thought they would use them to blow the whale into tiny pieces that could be eaten by scavengers, while most of it would be carried off by the next outgoing tide. Unfortunately that’s not as simple as it sounds and it turned out to be a big mistake.
After consulting with the U.S. Navy, which also sometimes deals with problems by using explosives, they decided to go for it. The Navy later said that it should have worked.
When interviewed before the event, highway engineer George Thornton said, “I’m confident that it will work. The only thing is, we’re not sure just exactly how much explosives it will take to disintegrate this thing so the scavengers—seagulls, crabs and whatnot—can clean it up.”
He decided half-a-ton should do it. They placed the twenty crates along the leeward side of the whale intending to blow it out into the ocean.
Explosives are often used to break up or sink whale carcasses, usually out at sea. And bloated ones eventually explode on their own as the guts liquefy and the gasses build, pushing against the outer rubbery skin lined with a thick layer of blubber.
On Taiwan in 2004 researchers were transporting a sixty-ton (55-tonne) sperm whale on a flat-bed truck through the city of Tainan to an animal sanctuary where they intended to perform a necropsy, when its stomach suddenly exploded, spilling guts and blood all over the downtown street.
At another stranding, a scientist warned not to walk on dead whales because the skin can rupture and you can fall inside of it. He added that he once fell into one up to his chest, adding that it can be difficult to get someone out.
In 2001 off of Australia, people actually left their boats to climb on a floating whale, while great white sharks were feasting on it from below.
But returning to the Oregon stranding: As Thornton’s men placed dynamite around the whale, Thornton moved nearby onlookers back a quarter mile to near a parking lot. About seventy-five observers—some of whom were families with their kids—had driven out to watch the spectacle and were sitting along the sand dunes. An expectant flock of seagulls also circled around nearby, looking like they were hoping to get something to eat.
One newspaper reporter who was there described it as being like a blubber snowstorm. People were retching and trying to get it off of them, but no matter what they did, the sickening stench would stay with them for days. Fortunately no one was hurt, but one large chunk of blubber about the size of a coffee table caved in the roof of an unfortunate businessman’s Oldsmobile, wrecking his car.
As people recovered, the seagulls were nowhere in sight, probably traumatized by the blast, or perhaps driven off by the smell. A very large portion of the whale remained, along with a large hole, so the highway workers used a bulldozer to push what was left of the whale in and then they buried it.
Right after the blast Thornton gave his assessment, saying, “It went just exactly right, except the blast funneled a hole in the sand under the whale.” This, he said, was why some of the whale headed towards the parking lot.
In 2020 for the 50th anniversary of the whale explosion, humorist Dave Berry, who helped popularize the story, explained, “Men like to blow things up. Statistically we have. Give us dynamite and give us a whale, we’re going to put those two things together and that’s what happened here. It’s too wonderful.”
Experts later said it should have worked, the problem was that the Oregon Highway Division didn’t use enough dynamite.
Oregon has now has the Exploding Whale Memorial Park near the site to commemorate the event and some people, mostly in Oregon, celebrate Exploding Whale Day every November 12th.
Nine years after the now famous whale explosion, a pod of forty-one whales beached themselves in Oregon, but they don’t blow up whales there anymore. Now they burn and bury them.
But that wasn’t always the case, and now Oregonians fondly recall a time when blubber rained from the sky.
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