This month marked the 54th anniversary of one of the most notable events in the history of North America – the time a whale exploded on an Oregon beach.
This was no ordinary whale explosion.
Let’s stop for a moment and note that there are, in fact, “ordinary” whale explosions. Sometimes, dead whales wash up on beaches, and they then decompose, and gases formed by the decomposition build up inside the whale’s abdomen, and then nature takes its messy course.
Most whales, of course, do not wash up on beaches. They float, and are then scavenged by sharks and predatory fish until they lose buoyancy, and then sink to the sea bed. This is known as a “whale fall,” and it’s a minor miracle of biology. When the whale hits the sea floor, the scavenging continues, with everything from hagfish to starfish consuming it slowly, over the course of many years. Then specialized worms bore their way through the skeleton, seeking out calcium and minerals that can be found nowhere else in the dark, cold, crushing depths of the deep ocean.
Anyway, the Oregon whale beach blast was nothing like either of these ends, both of which are normal and natural for a whale.
Nope, this whale, a sperm whale, washed up near Florence, Ore. and quickly became offensive to the local population. Several tons of decomposing whale does not smell that good.
So the state highways department (which was responsible for the beaches) asked around, and got some advice about whale remains, and they invested in a whole bunch of dynamite.
The idea was, as George Thornton of the Highway Division told reporter Paul Linnman of KATU that they were confident this plan would work, but they didn’t know how much explosive it would take to “disintegrate” the whale, which was estimated at eight tons.
They started with 450 kilos of explosives.
It was both too much and too little.
In the video captured by cameraman Doug Brazil, there is a tremendous blast. The whale vanishes behind a cloud of smoke and sand.
And then it begins to rain blubber.
People had been pushed back a quarter mile for their safety, but that proved not quite far enough. No one was killed by flying whale meat, but a car in a nearby parking lot had its soft-top caved in pretty badly.
The whale, far from being disintegrated, was still largely intact on the beach, and smelled no better than it had before. The chunks of whale meat that had been spread for almost half a mile in every direction were far too big to simply decompose, or to be snapped up by sea birds.
What remained of the carcass was buried where it lay by a small bulldozer.
Is there a moral to this story? I think there are two.
First, nature is beyond our control. We think we can handle something as simple as a large dead animal, but we can’t. The same applies to phenomena as diverse as tidal waves and bee swarms.
Second, there is no right amount of explosives to apply to a dead whale.
