Happy botched whale corpse disposal day to you and yours.
Just last year, Florence Mayor Rob Ward stood in front of a small crowd at Exploding Whale Memorial Park to announce that the whole month of November in 2024 would be “the month to memorialize the exploding whale.”
If you’re confused, allow us to clear it up for you.
On November 12, 1970, officials on the Oregon coast were facing a whale of a problem: a sperm whale corpse had washed up on shore.
It was huge, it smelled and was attracting wildlife as it began to rot. The question of whether the whale carcass would blow up on its own as a product of putrefaction, a process of decomposition that can cause a gas build up, was on officials’ minds, too.
So, authorities turned to 20 cases of dynamite. The hope was that the explosives would obliterate the carcass to the point that nature’s scavengers could take care of the rest.
In actuality, the zealous use of explosives meant that “the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds,” as was reported by KATU News journalist Paul Linnman at the time.
Huge chunks of blubber sailed through the air, becoming potentially dangerous projectiles that hit people and ultimately were not small enough to be taken care of by wildlife. The whale chunks had to be collected from the surrounding area and several large pieces of the whale had to be buried on the beach anyway.
While the exploding whale lore feels like Oregon’s curious little cetacean secret, during the pandemic a humor columnist resurfaced the infamous news clip showing the explosion and some ensuing chaos, bringing the weird history into the annals of internet virality.
The clip from KATU on YouTube has more than 20 million views. In 2020, a site near where the whale met its explosive end was dedicated as Exploding Whale Memorial Park. Visitors to the coast can find holiday-like atmosphere marking the explosion every year.
Alternative singer and songwriter Sufjan Stevens wrote a song about it and the Portland Pickles baseball team exploded a cardboard whale carcass during the 7th inning in 2022.
Now, there’s a documentary.
Oh Whale is a documentary by Winslow Crane-Murdoch that takes a look back at the sort of virality that surrounded the incident when it happened in 1970, before its memeification in 2020.
The documentary will be showing at the Tomorrow Theater on Nov. 12. The 7 p.m. showing, with a Q&A with Paul Linnman sold out, so an earlier screening has been added due to popular demand.
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