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    "headline": "Oregon blew up a beached sperm whale with half a ton of dynamite in Florence on 12 November 1970",
    "description": "On 12 November 1970, Oregon highway crews in Florence blew up a beached sperm whale with half a ton of dynamite, raining blubber up to 800 feet away.",
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    "keywords": "Exploding whale, Florence, Oregon, George Thornton, Oregon Department of Transportation, Sperm whale",
    "articleBody": "At 3:45 p.m. on 12 November 1970, Oregon highway workers set off half a ton of dynamite under a dead sperm whale on the beach at Florence. Sand and whale rose in a column about 100 feet high, spectators ran for cover, and chunks of blubber came down as far as 800 feet away, one of them flattening a car. Fifty-six years later, the town throws a party about it. A whale treated like a boulder The 45-foot animal had washed up three days earlier, on 9 November. It weighed an estimated eight tons. Oregon’s beaches were then run by the State Highway Division, the agency now called the Oregon Department of Transportation, so road engineers got the job. Officials worried about more than the smell. A rotting carcass could burst on its own, and curious visitors might climb on it and fall in. After talking with the US Navy and munitions specialists, assistant district highway engineer George Thornton decided to handle it the way crews handle a boulder in a roadway: blow it apart. The theory was that the pieces would be small enough for gulls and other scavengers to finish off. Thornton later admitted he was not sure how much explosive the job needed, and said he had drawn the assignment because his supervisor was away hunting. A passing military veteran with explosives training warned that 20 cases of dynamite was far too much and that 20 sticks would do. Nobody took his advice. The numbers behind the blast Here is the scale of the overkill, worked out from the figures on record. Half a short ton of dynamite is 1,000 pounds. The veteran’s 20 sticks came to about 8.4 pounds. Divide one by the other and the crew used roughly 119 times the charge an expert on the beach thought was enough. Against an eight-ton (16,000-pound) whale, that is one pound of dynamite for every 16 pounds of carcass. It still did not finish the job. Most of the whale stayed on the sand for workers to clear by hand, and the scavenger birds stayed away, probably scared off by the noise. A local man who had just bought a new car in a promotion called “Get a Whale of a Deal” found it dented by falling blubber. No one was hurt. The reporter filming that afternoon summed it up in his narration: “the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds.” Thornton saw it differently. “It went just exactly right,” he told a reporter that evening, adding only that the blast had dug a hole in the sand beneath the whale. From local mishap to early viral video The story might have stayed a local joke. Then on 20 May 1990, humorist Dave Barry wrote a column about the footage. A shortened copy, stripped of the date, spread across electronic bulletin boards, and the state transportation department’s phones began to ring. “They thought the whale had washed ashore recently, and were hot on the trail of a governmental blubber flub-up,” said Ed Schoaps, the department’s public affairs coordinator. “They were disappointed that the story has twenty-five years of dust on it.” The clip later spread as a web video; a 2006 study counted 350 million views across various sites. Oregon learned its lesson sooner. When 41 sperm whales stranded near Florence in 1979, officials buried them instead, and state policy today is to bury beached whales where they land. For more strange encounters between people and ocean giants, read how underwater recorders tracked the elusive Omura’s whale off Australia and how a Greenland skull proved the existence of the narwhal-beluga hybrid known as the narluga. Our Offbeat section has more. In 2020, Florence residents voted to name a new recreation area Exploding Whale Memorial Park, complete with a plaque. Exploding Whale Day is now held there every year, and the local Siuslaw Pioneer Museum still keeps bone fragments from the whale. Further reading Wikipedia: Exploding whale Image: Surv1v4l1st, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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