When Oregon blew up a whale with 20 cases of dynamite (2024)

https://katu.com/news/local/exploding-whale-day-54-years-since-whale-infamously-blown-up-on-oregon-beach

by gscott • 1 year ago

83 65 1 year ago

gnabgib• 1 year ago

(2024)

They named a park after it: Oregon town names park after rotting whale officials blew up 50 years ago (3 points, 5 years ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23604100

Related The Exploding Whale remastered: 50th anniversary of legendary Oregon event (209 points, 4 years ago, 74 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25070440

pvg• 1 year ago

There's gotta be a long danglist of relateds in one of these posts somewhere given it's such an evergreen.

ahazred8ta• 1 year ago

The whale exploded in a blast of flame. The watchers cheered to see the same. As we all know, it really doesn't do To disregard what Newton knew. But there are those who'd pay them quite a fee To go clean Washington, DC.

http://www.kayshapero.net/

jlmorton• 1 year ago

The blown up whale in Oregon is sort of like the SR-71 speed readout story. Reposted endlessly, but you just kind of accept it.

MrBuddyCasino• 1 year ago

The two whales:

- blown up by dynamite

- 393-years old, wandering the ocean since 1627

dredmorbius• 1 year ago

There are whales, still alive, who existed when Herman Melville first published Moby Dick.

And they still haven't read it.

jounker• 1 year ago

There’s film of the whale being blown up. The best part is the sound of whale meat falling from the sky.

red-iron-pine• 1 year ago

you don't have to accept it. it was filled live, and covered expensively.

chunks of whale fell on peoples' cars and required insurance payouts. it is well documented, and unlike the SR-71 -- classified stuff + pilot bravado -- this is just a glorious fuckup

DiggyJohnson• 1 year ago

I don’t think GP was questioning the truth of the matter

postexitus• 1 year ago

don't think it was that expensive.

Magi604• 1 year ago

SR-71 speed readout story

Are you referring to this: https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Stories/sr-71-blac...

Never heard of it before, but just read it now, and it's a fantastic little story.

mikepurvis• 1 year ago

I have an autographed copy of Brian Shul's book, which is the origin of it. He used to sell them through his website, though he passed away in 2023:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/us/brian-shul-dead.html

defrost• 1 year ago

Bit of a wasted opportunity to earn a bit of extra cash for the community there:

  Climbing inside the carcass of a whale was once thought to bring relief to rheumatism sufferers

~ https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-26807485

lupusreal• 1 year ago

Reminds me of an old pain relieve remedy. If your foot or whatever is in pain, just hit your thumb with a hammer. You'll forget about your previous ailment when you're busy feeling sorry for your new one.

kylehotchkiss• 1 year ago

I love the list of half considered excuses considered before landing on dynamite. They just wanted to use dynamite.

cyberax• 1 year ago

Yeah. They just needed more of it.

potato37328423• 1 year ago

In the early 70s it was common to use dynamite for all manner of stuff like this.

I'm not gonna say it would have been routine at a small county highway department but in some lines of work it absolutely would have been. It wasn't cheap but it was cheap enough that a typical rural land owner would rather just dynamite stumps or boulders rather than tackle them with any machine small enough that you'd have to dig out around it rather than rip it from the earth in one go.

You don't realize how much you miss it until you start out pricing the options for clearing rocky forest.

bigbacaloa• 1 year ago

Folks used it to clear old tree stumps too.

ceejayoz• 1 year ago

And for the really big jobs there’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare

quanto• 1 year ago

Your last quip fascinates me. Do you price options such? How is the pricing different under different methods?

philwelch• 1 year ago

So what happened to make it not as commonly used anymore?

saalweachter• 1 year ago

Also, dynamite doesn't last forever -- so if you are a municipality with excess dynamite that is approaching its end of shelf life, and disposing of it unused is tantamount to admitting you wasted money buying it ...

mschuster91• 1 year ago

They just wanted to use dynamite.

It's not uncommon to break up large cadavers so they can be eaten by scavenger animals before the rot causes olfactory issues or poses actual health risk.

In Austria for example, cattle which died on the alpine pastures (about 20 a year) was usually blown up to allow scavenger animals to quickly dispose of the remains as that was way cheaper than hauling the carcasses off with helicopters [1], but after some outrage in 2001, eventually the government decided in 2004 that the practice would now be banned, in exchange the government took over the helicopter transport bills.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprengung_verendeter_Rinder

firefax3• 1 year ago

Firefox auto translate is super useful for pages like this where there's no EN equivalent, thanks for sharing.

If a cow or similar cattle ship outside the slaughterhouse by lightning, fall, illness or for similar reasons, it is up to the owner, i.e. usually the farmer, to ensure the transport and disposal of the animal body in Austria to ensure the protection of water bodies and an intact landscape.[ 1] In the Vorarlberg Alps, about 20 such deaths occur each year. If the carcass is located on an alpine pasture or at anywhere else that cannot be reached by truck, only a transport by helicopter is possible. It cost 15,000 Austrian shillings in 2001. This corresponds approx. adjusted for inflation by 2025. 1,500 euros.[ 2]
Although at least in Vorarlberg 80 percent of these transport costs were covered by the federal state, the farmer was only approx. It was customary to pay for the helicopter 3,000 shillings there instead to eliminate the animals by blasting it on the spot. This beat in 2001 only with 500 shillings.[ 2] Thus, the farmer was able to approx. 2,500 shillings (approx. 250 Euro) save. The explosion ripped the animal into smaller pieces, which should then be removed more quickly or eliminated by eaters such as birds and vows. The explosion was either by explosives, which in turn meant increased costs or by the farmers themselves.

(It was interesting to see the term for this event is "Walexplosion" in German -- I cannot speak the language but I did enough Duolingo, paired with a trip to DE and Austria that I can jump between machine translation and a dictionary and understand things in the written form)

Edit: The grammar of German seems to get translated quite literally, heh.

piperswe• 1 year ago

See also: "Obliterating Animal Carcasses With Explosives" published by the US Forest Service: https://www.intrans.iastate.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/B...

rsynnott2• 1 year ago

Florence celebrates Exploding Whale Day annually at Exploding Whale Memorial Park. In 2024, the public was invited to build an altar for the exploded whale.

I mean, I suppose if you’ve got one thing, you may as well really run with it.

davidw• 1 year ago

Florence is actually a nice area if the Oregon coast is your kind of thing. There are some really big dunes nearby, the national forest, some inland lakes and of course the beach itself

https://maps.app.goo.gl/HT9ynCaNREReuS1PA

Of course, it's usually chilly and windy, so come prepared, especially in summer.

gp2000• 1 year ago

I first heard of this in humorist Dave Barry's column. His description is worth a read.

https://www.theexplodingwhale.com/evidence/resources/dave-ba...

pfdietz• 1 year ago

"I am probably not guilty of understatement when I say that what follows, on the videotape, is the most wonderful event in the history of the universe."

TylerE• 1 year ago

This was one of the original internet memes. I remember my 9th grade computer graphics teacher showing it to us off some like 240p 15fps .mov file. It was 1999!

potato37328423• 1 year ago

Originally the lesson from this was don't be cheap when you only have one shot to do something lest you create pink chunks when you need pink mist or some other worse than the starting point type situation.

Now, well over 50yr later the most obvious lesson is how far the journalism profession has fallen when it comes to word choice.

ourmandave• 1 year ago

This sounds like a late-in-series episode of Myth Busters when every show ended with a huge explosion or insane collision.

cjs_ac• 1 year ago

"So I'm all excited, and I went over to my dad: 'They're going to blow it up, 20 cases of dynamite,' and my father proceeded to say, 'I think you misheard them. I think he said 20 sticks,"' Umenhofer recalled in 2015. "And I said, 'No he said 20 cases.'"
It was indeed 20 cases of dynamite.

Reminiscent of this letter by Evelyn Waugh to his wife during the Second World War:

Darling...
So No. 3 Cmdo were very anxious to be chums with Lord Glasgow so they offered to blow up an old tree stump for him and he was very grateful and he said don't spoil the plantation of young trees near it because that is the apple of my eye and they said no of course not we can blow a tree down so that it falls on a sixpence and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever and he asked them all to luncheon for the great explosion. So Col. Durnford-Slater D.S.O. said to his subaltern, have you put enough explosive in the tree. Yes sir, 75 lbs. Is that enough? Yes sir I worked it out by mathematics it is exactly right. Well better put a bit more. Very good sir.
And when Col. D. Slater D.S.O. had had his port he sent for the subaltern and said subaltern better put a bit more explosive in that tree. I don't want to disappoint Lord Glasgow. Very good sir.
Then they all went out to see the explosion and Col. D.S. D.S.O. said you will see that tree fall flat at just that angle where it will hurt no young trees and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever.
So soon they lit the fuse and waited for the explosion and presently the tree, instead of falling quietly sideways, rose 50 feet into the air taking with it half an acre of soil and the whole of the young plantation.
And the subaltern said Sir I made a mistake, it should have been 7.5 lbs not 75.
Lord Glasgow was so upset he walked in dead silence back to his castle and when they came to the turn of the drive in sight of his castle what should they find but that every pane of glass in the building was broken.
So Lord Glasgow gave a little cry and ran to hide his emotion in the lavatory and there when he pulled the plug the entire ceiling, loosened by the explosion, fell on his head.
This is quite true.

noneeeed• 1 year ago

That reads like the script from a sitcom. Amazing.

rsynnott2• 1 year ago

I mean, Waugh was a comic writer; if he was still around he probably _would_ be writing sitcoms. I don’t entirely buy his claims of truth here.

bell-cot• 1 year ago

A vaguely-remembered old and likely-British quote:

"It is generally desirable that a 'demolition expert' actually be the latter."

codethief• 1 year ago

the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds

They don't make them like that anymore.

solardev• 1 year ago

Reminds me of when one exploded on a busy street in Taiwan, scattering blood and guts everywhere and leaving a horrendous odor for days/weeks: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna4096586

The 56-foot-long whale had been on a truck headed for a necropsy by researchers, when gases from internal decay caused its entrails to explode in the southern city of Tainan.
Residents and shop owners wore masks while trying to clean up the spilt blood and entrails.
"What a stinking mess. This blood and other stuff that blew out on the road is disgusting, and the smell is really awful," a BBC News report quoted one Tainan resident as saying.

pandemic_region• 1 year ago

What a throwback to heavy.com early 2000s where I first saw this video. Hilarious.

JKCalhoun• 1 year ago

Yeah, one of the first video "memes" that I remember.

Thew whale and that guy losing his shit in a cubicle and destroying his PC.

hrnnnnnn• 1 year ago

Brett Domino wrote a song about this.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=UJHKB4arFNQ

jimbosis• 1 year ago

Thank you for sharing this.

I want to add that Sufjan Stevens has a song, "Exploding Whale", which is not really about the event per se, but uses it as a metaphor: "....Embrace the epic fail/Of my exploding whale...."

https://sufjanstevens.bandcamp.com/album/exploding-whale

lenerdenator2• 1 year ago

Idk, I just kinda feel like maybe standing 50 yards away and shooting it with a hunting rifle would have poked enough holes in it for the pressure to slowly release.

rtkwe• 1 year ago

The goal was to dispose of the carcass by dispersion and allowing scavengers to eat the smaller pieces it would be blown into as well as directing most of it out to see so fish etc might help consume it. It's not an unheard of practice when a corpse needs to be gotten rid of faster than normal decomposition but it's impractical to move it.

There are two basic methods; a little bit of explosives to break it up when there's time for scavengers to get rid of it, that method calls for 20 pounds under a horse sized corpse, or obliteration when the public will be around sooner so it needs to be broken down very small, which calls for a whole 55 pound fireline for a horse sized corpse.

https://www.intrans.iastate.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/B...

lenerdenator2• 1 year ago

Huh. Fair enough.

RajT88• 1 year ago

Nowadays they drag them out to sea for scavengers, yes?

Another good option would be burning it in place. Make wood fires on top of the carcass which will burn down into the blubber and effectively make a giant candle.

frozenlettuce• 1 year ago

The sentence "The blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds" deserves to be engraved there

stephencanon• 1 year ago

Let's not forget "land-lubber newsmen, soon to become land-blubber newsmen"

joshdavham• 1 year ago

What should they have done instead to dispose of the whale? On its face, dynamite doesn’t sound totally implausible. Should they have just used even more?

Axsuul• 1 year ago

Antimatter

smurpy• 1 year ago

Exactly. One whale’s weight of antimatter

fifilura• 1 year ago

I think a chainsaw would suffice.

Whalers have been taking care of whale carcasses for ages, it is not like it is a first?

latexr• 1 year ago

I think a chainsaw would suffice.

From the video:

The carcass (…) couldn’t be cut up and then buried because nobody wanted to cut it up.

devilbunny• 1 year ago

Whalers only want them when they're fresh.

The whaling museum in Nantucket has a fascinating display about a beached whale that died there. Since the museum has examples of the equipment that was used to extract oil, it was decided to extract its oil in the traditional fashion.

One whale corpse yields quite a lot of oil. The highest value was placed on oils that remained liquid even in winter, so the summer's oils were kept until then. They were exposed to the cold, and the portion that remained liquid in each barrel was poured off to get this most-expensive fraction. As weather warmed up and other fractions became liquid, they were serially decanted. By the time summer arrived, only the highest-melting-point fractions were left.

Fascinating place; if you ever happen to be there, I recommend a visit. It's quite close to the ferry landing.

NotYourLawyer• 1 year ago

I bet it would burn just fine. Lots of blubber.

jagermo• 1 year ago

i love the confidence of the demolitions person. Reminds me of so many Mythbusters episodes.

erghjunk• 1 year ago

The video of this was the first big file that my brother and I downloaded from the internet circa 1995-6 or so. It took a long, long time over our measly 14.4 connection but it was worth every minute.

dfxm12• 1 year ago

(2024)

As a meta note, putting 2024 on this is a bit of editorializing & arguably linkbait. It was published 5 mo ago in November. We don't tag (Jan) for things submitted in June, do we?

Everyone [0] knows Oregon blew up a whale in 1970. In any case, a recap of this famous event should be able to stand on its own with the article's headline, which is more descriptive than what we have: "Happy Anniversary: 54 years later, Oregon still can't get enough of its exploding whale".

0 - figuratively

When Oregon blew up a whale with 20 cases of dynamite (2024)

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