One of the most excessive and gory stories you have ever heard in your life is also one of the funniest, because for a change it does not involve the suffering of any living being, but rather a series of unfortunate decisions and systematic ignorance of the laws of physics. It’s the story of the Oregon exploding whale, a crazy event that just turned 55 years old… and is still being celebrated.
The problem. On November 12, 1970, engineers from the Oregon Highway Division, which is in charge of road traffic on a day-to-day basis, encountered an unusual dilemma on the beach in the small coastal town of Florence: getting rid of a dead eight-ton sperm whale that had been decomposing in the sun for three days. After consulting with the Navy about demolition techniques, the team decided to apply a solution as direct as it was disastrous to the carcass: half a ton of dynamite (twenty boxes), in the hope of pulverizing the cetacean. The seagulls would be in charge of cleaning up the remains.
Good marines, bad advisors. The consultation turned out to be counterproductive. The Marines advised on demolition with explosives, their specialty, but no one consulted marine biologists or coastal wildlife experts. Walter Umenhofer, a local businessman with military experience, warned Thornton that twenty boxes of dynamite was excessive: he recommended twenty individual cartridges or, if not, a much larger amount to completely pulverize organic tissue. His advice was ignored.
Boom. The detonation, at 3:45 PM, caused an apocalypse of sand and blubber 30 meters high, sending whale fragments in all directions. Blocks of tissue and muscle the size of coffee tables fell on spectators located at a safe distance of more than 400 meters from the explosion point. The screams of excitement from the hundred or so spectators turned into screams of horror as fragments of tissue fell from the sky. Some of the pieces of fat, almost a meter long, crushed the roof of a vehicle. The smell of burning flesh lingered for days and the seagulls never appeared.
The decision of George Thornton, responsible for the action, lacked technical basis from the beginning. In a previous interview, he admitted: “I’m sure it will work. The only thing we’re not sure about is exactly how much dynamite we’ll need to break this… thing up, so the seagulls and crabs and other scavengers can clean it up.” Thornton decided to treat the cetacean like a rock on a road: half a ton of explosives strategically placed under the animal, in the hope that the force would propel the remains into the Pacific.
What to do with a whale. Cetacean strandings have posed logistical dilemmas for coastal authorities for decades. Before the development of unified scientific protocols (prioritizing scientific necropsy over rapid disposal), methods for dealing with dead whales often relied on improvisation. The most common options included burial on the beach, towing out to sea for sinking, or simply allowing the animal to decompose naturally. Currently, disposal methods have evolved: countries such as South Africa, Iceland and Australia continue to use controlled explosives after towing cetaceans out to sea, but the United States eventually abandoned this practice. When 41 sperm whales stranded near Florence in 1979, authorities buried them without hesitation.
Hunting In 1970, Oregon lacked specific guidelines for these cases. The Oregon Highway Division had jurisdiction over state beaches (an administrative quirk arising from the legal consideration of coastlines as part of the public highway system) but no expertise in marine biology. When the sperm whale arrived in Florence, George Thornton publicly admitted that he had been assigned to the case “because his supervisor had gone hunting.” The closest precedent had been successful because of its modesty: two years earlier, in 1968, authorities in Long Beach, Washington, had managed a similar stranding through conventional burial without incident.
The unforgettable video. It was all immortalized by KATU journalist Paul Linnman, who arrived at the scene initially frustrated by what he considered a menial assignment. Until he found out the amount of dynamite involved. Together with cameraman Doug Brazil, he documented the event on 16mm film with live magnetically recorded audio, a format that, unlike video, would retain its visual quality for decades.
On. After the disaster, most of the sperm whale remained intact on the beach. Highway Division workers spent the afternoon manually burying the remains, including huge sections of the animal that were not moved from the explosion point. Thornton declared to Bacon that same afternoon that everything had gone “well…except that the explosion dug a hole in the sand beneath the whale,” directing the force upward rather than toward the ocean. Decades later, Thornton was still defending the operation as a technical success distorted by hostile media coverage.
It goes viral. For two decades, the incident remained a regional anecdote until comedian Dave Barry resurrected the story in his Miami Herald column on May 20, 1990. Titled “The Far Side Comes to Life in Oregon,” in reference to Gary Larson’s immortal series. His description of the event introduced the American public to the concept of “epic fail” before the digital age popularized the term. The Oregon Department of Transportation received calls from angry people, convinced the incident had occurred recently. Which makes the exploding whale one of the first stories to go viral on the internet.
Beyond the meme. The phenomenon transcended the purely digital. In 2015, Oregon indie musician Sufjan Stevens released the song ‘Exploding Whale’, where he said “Embrace the epic failure of my exploding whale.” Of course, the event appeared on ‘The Simpsons’, in the 2010 episode ‘The Squirt and the Whale’. In 2020, the Oregon Historical Society commissioned a 4K restoration of the original 16mm footage of the news story.
The laughs. 55 years later, that fiasco in public management has been transformed into folklore and local heritage. In 2024, Florence declared November “Exploding Whale Month,” and the city celebrates the anniversary with a festival that culminates with the “Superlative Exploding Whale Awards,” where outstanding citizens are honored, at Exploding Whale Memorial Park.
In WorldOfSoftware | The surprising thing is not that we have been making things from whale bone for 20,000 years. It’s just that we started before learning to hunt them
