The Famous Exploding Whale of Florence

It’s November 1970. A massive whale carcass washes ashore on a Florence beach, bringing quite a media frenzy, hordes of onlookers and a nasty stench, despite the cold winter air.

At this time, Oregon Highway Division is in charge of the proceedings. It’s still called that. The name of Oregon Department of Transportation – or ODOT – hasn’t been mandated yet.

But a state agency is a state agency by any other name, and the division makes a historic blunder of, well, whale-sized proportions. To take care of the creature, they decided to stick dynamite next to it and blow it to bits. It was, to say the least, a learning experience.

The idea was that if they exploded a device from one side of the whale, in just the right angle and spot, it would blow the whale apart into a myriad of smaller pieces. Those would theoretically be more manageable and could be buried in the sand, while smaller bits would be gobbled up by birds and such.

In one extremely famous film clip, still available on the Net, a very young Paul Linneman from Portland's KATU-2 comments as the whale is blown up. He is suddenly forced to run as it rains various sized chunks of blubber onto a cheering - then panicking - crowd. One flying slab wrecked a car a quarter of a mile away.

Meanwhile, you could hear chunks making squishing noises in the background as they hit the ground.

Linneman’s most famous line: “….blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds.”

A man named Thornton, who was the Highway Division's head of the project at the time, will still not speak to the press to this day. Back in 2000, the Eugene Register-Guard did a thirty-year retrospective on the infamous event and he still refused comment.

Footage of this is still one of the hottest Internet downloads around. Simply do a search on "exploding whale" and you'll find film footage of it and various articles, including one by humorist Dave Berry.