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

cjs_ac

> "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

That reads like the script from a sitcom. Amazing.

rsynnott

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.

frozenlettuce

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

RajT88

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.

jlmorton

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.

jounker

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

MrBuddyCasino

The two whales:

- blown up by dynamite

- 393-years old, wandering the ocean since 1627

codethief

> the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds

They don't make them like that anymore.

hrnnnnnn

Brett Domino wrote a song about this.

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

kylehotchkiss

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

potato3732842

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.

ceejayoz

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

quanto

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

bigbacaloa

Folks used it to clear old tree stumps too.

mschuster91

> 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

cyberax

Yeah. They just needed more of it.

lenerdenator

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

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...

lenerdenator

Huh. Fair enough.

gp2000

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

"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."

solardev

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.

gnabgib

(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

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

ourmandave

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