On This Day in History: November 12

The tale of the exploding whale

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“Thar, she blows!” Except this wasn’t a case of a whale expelling water and air from its blowhole; it was a dead sperm whale rotting on an Oregon beach that some genius thought the best way to dispose of was to use a thousand pounds of dynamite. To say things did not go as planned would be a gross, and I mean really fucking gross, understatement.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: November 12, 1970--

It should come as no surprise that 16,000 pounds of dead whale left to rot in the sun for three days doesn’t smell so good. People in the small city of Florence, Oregon wanted something done. Oregon didn’t have a Department of Rotting Whale Carcass Removal, but they did have the Oregon Highway Division, and apparently beaches fell under the jurisdiction of highways because dune buggies or some shit. I don’t know. Anyway, the highway guys talked to some Navy guys and they decided, “Let’s blow that fucker to Neptune.” The planet? The Roman god of the sea? Who knows? But they wanted to explode that cetacean, and so they did. Kind of.

The idea is that they would blow it to literal bits that would be small enough for scavengers such as seagulls to come along and say oh wow thanks bits of exploded rotting sperm whale is my favorite, and eat it all up and smelly problem solved.

That is not what happened.

The whalesplosion, which took place on November 12, 1970, was a media and spectator event. I mean, if you heard the gubmint was gonna blow the shit out some mega sea creature nearby, you’d go watch, wouldn’t you? Of course you would, and you’d regret the fuck out of it. Because they did the kaboom, and it did not neatly blow the whale into little bite-sized chunks. Rather, it threw massive chunks as far as 300 yards, raining stenchy whale gore down upon the crowd. One piece the size of a refrigerator destroyed a car in the parking lot.

And it didn’t even get rid of the whale. They blew a fair-sized chunk out of it, but most of the carcass remained right where it was. What wasn’t around anymore was a single fucking seagull.

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