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Today is the 50th anniversary of the infamous Exploding Whale of Oregon incident, one of my favourite bizarre tales from history.
(THREAD, sources listed here https://bit.ly/3eOT2Km )
(THREAD, sources listed here https://bit.ly/3eOT2Km )
In November 1970, an 8-ton sperm whale managed to beach itself just off the Oregon coast. As far as send-offs go, being blobbing your way onto the beach isn't the most dignified of affairs. For instance, you'd never suggest it for your nan.
However, things were about to get a lot worse for old whaley, and about a thousand tonnes more dynamitey.
The whale, for some reason in the US at that time, fell under the jurisdiction of the highway division. If you ever come across a whale carcass I'm sure you'll note how similar the problem of getting rid of it is to telling a driver to fix their tail lights please.
In their wisdom, and following a call with the Navy (who are sort of world-renowned for solving their problems by blowing the shit out of them), they decided to solve the whale problem by blowing the shit out of it.
The plan was to get some dynamite and obliterate part of the whale whilst firing the rest of it out into the sea like you were playing Angry Birds.
The theory was that the dynamite would get most of the carcass far enough that it would drift into the ocean, leaving the smaller, more digestible (and let's face it, cooked) bits of delicious whale corpse for the smaller animals like seagulls to chow down on.
So far, so grim, but hardly anything to write home about. People blow up whales all the time in America, probably.
Now you'd think if you were going to blast a whale to smithereens you'd sit down and have a bit of a think about how much dynamite was necessary, rather than just put 20 crates underneath it and "see what happens".
Or maybe you'd at least listen to somebody with explosives training when they tell you "I think you've overdone the old dynamite if I'm honest." Well, you'd be wrong and you're embarrassing yourself quite frankly, grow up.
Enter businessman and explosives guy Walt Umenhofer. He was on a drive in a brand new car he'd bought days earlier from a car dealership offering a "whale of a deal" promotion (this will become relevant later, whale-corpse-based serendipity fans) when he happened upon the scene.
Umenhofer had received explosives training during World War II and was not convinced the highway division had got their calculations right, being, as you will soon discover, fucking idiots.
He told them they either needed a lot fewer explosives to push it out to sea – he suggested 20 sticks, where they were using 20 crates – or a hell of a lot more in order to completely obliterate the carcass into tiny chewable endangered whale nuggets.
The head of the project dismissed him, and he retreated as far as he could to watch the inevitable disaster. He went up to the road where his shiny new car was, minding its own business and being whale-free.
Joining him were local journalists documenting the whole thing, and citizens who just fancied a bit of a gawp.
Look I'm a vegetarian and I'm not saying I'm proud of myself but if someone said "there are a bunch of people at the beach who have never blown up a whale before and they're going to try and blow up a whale" I'm not not pushing my way to the front avec popcorn.
All that was left to do, before the grim spectacle unfolded, was for project manager George Thornton to tell reporters - and this is a direct quote - "well, I'm confident that it'll work, the only thing is we're not sure how much explosives it'll take to disintegrate this thing."
At this point I’m going to insist you to watch some of the footage, because of course there’s footage.
As you can see, the explosion caused massive pieces of blubber to get blown quite some distance onto buildings, cars in parking lots, and people who had previously been minding their own business and enjoying how whale blubber wasn't currently raining down from the sky.
“Explosions in the movies usually look like a blast of fire and smoke," one journalist in attendance that day, Paul Linnman, later described the incident in a book. "This one more resembled a mighty burst of tomato juice.”
The whale debris rained down so far away some hit the new car of Walt Umenhofer, completely caving in the roof, which he'd bought in a whaley good deal you'll remember from a few paragraphs prior.
"My insurance company's never going to believe this," Umenhofer reportedly said as a highway worker removed some blubber from his car with a shovel.
After all this, the project manager told reporters that "it went just exactly right," except for the blast creating a hole underneath the whale, and thereby causing the whale to be blasted towards the onlookers, creating the meaty downpour of partially cooked whale soup.
New footage has been released today, and I will update you with the article when I’m done writing about it.
If you enjoyed this thread telling history in a fun way, you might enjoy one of my books telling history in a fun way. https://linktr.ee/SunburnJamesFelton
