The Off-Key Bard
History

This Day in History — The Day Oregon Blew Up a Whale

On this day in 1970

On November 12, 1970, Oregon highway crews set off 1,000 pounds of dynamite under a dead sperm whale. Blubber crushed a car and rained down on the crowd.

The Off-Key Bard stands on a windswept beach near Florence, Oregon, in November 1970. The Pacific rolls toward the shore, gulls circle overhead, and a small crowd has gathered behind the dunes. An enormous dead whale lies on the sand, and the smell is catastrophic. State highway officials believe they have found a solution. Dynamite. One thousand pounds of it. The plan is to reduce the whale to pieces small enough for birds and other scavengers to finish off.

"What could possibly go wrong?"

On November 12, 1970, the Oregon State Highway Division tried to dispose of a decomposing sperm whale near Florence by blowing it up. The animal measured about 45 feet and weighed an estimated 8 tons. The blast sent a plume of sand and whale about 100 feet into the air, and big chunks of blubber came down among the spectators and on a parked car. No one was seriously hurt. Most of the whale was still on the beach afterward, and a bulldozer had to bury what was left, which was the very job the dynamite was supposed to avoid.

A Dead Whale and No Plan

The whale washed ashore on November 9, 1970, just south of Florence. Early newspaper reports identified it as a gray whale, but it was later established to be a sperm whale. At first, the carcass was a curiosity. As it decomposed, however, the smell spread through the dunes, and officials faced the problem of removing an eight-ton animal from a public beach.

That somebody was the Oregon State Highway Division, the predecessor of today's Oregon Department of Transportation, because it was the agency responsible for Oregon's beaches. The Oregon Encyclopedia notes that the division was called in to remove the whale. It had no experience with whale carcasses. Burying the animal was rejected at first, according to the Siuslaw News, because the tide would simply uncover it again.

Assistant District Highway Engineer George Thornton was put in charge. Wikipedia says he got the job because his supervisor was away hunting. Highway engineers knew dynamite, which breaks up boulders and clears obstacles, and the Oregon Encyclopedia says Thornton decided to treat the whale as a boulder. The scavengers would do the rest.

Consulting the Experts

Before attempting the demolition, highway officials sought advice on how to break apart such an enormous carcass. The Oregon Encyclopedia reports that Assistant District Highway Engineer George Thornton consulted U.S. Navy and munitions experts before deciding to use dynamite. The plan was to place the explosives beneath the landward side of the whale, sending most of the remains toward the ocean, where scavengers could finish the cleanup. Thornton expected the blast to produce relatively small pieces rather than the enormous chunks it ultimately threw into the air.

Not everyone was convinced. Walter Umenhofer, a spectator with explosives experience from his military service, later recalled warning that the amount of dynamite was excessive and that spectators were too close. His account became part of the story in subsequent interviews, although the exact wording of the exchange is difficult to establish from contemporary records. What is certain is that the safety perimeter failed to contain the debris, and one of the vehicles damaged by falling blubber belonged to Umenhofer himself.

The amount of explosives is unusually well documented. In its November 13, 1970 account, the Eugene Register-Guard reported that highway workers placed twenty 50-pound cases of explosives beneath the whale, totaling approximately 1,000 pounds, or half a short ton. In KATU's original report, Thornton expressed confidence in the approach while acknowledging uncertainty about how much explosive force would be needed to disintegrate the carcass. The charge was positioned with the intention of sending much of the debris seaward, but the explosion scattered whale remains in multiple directions. Rather than reducing the carcass to pieces scavengers could easily consume, it launched heavy chunks of blubber far beyond the expected disposal area.

November 12, 1970

By the afternoon of November 12 the news had spread. The Siuslaw News counts about 75 spectators, whom police moved back about a quarter mile at 3:30 p.m. KATU, a Portland television station, sent reporter Paul Linnman and cameraman Doug Brazil, who shot the event on 16-millimeter film. The detonation came at 3:45 p.m.

The explosion was bigger than anyone expected. Sand, smoke and whale flew into the air in a plume about 100 feet high. Then it came down. Linnman's report included the line "the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds," and he described pieces of meat passing high over the crew's heads while others fell at their feet. On the film, a woman in the crowd says, "Here come pieces of … uh … whale," according to the Washington Post story reprinted by the Spokesman-Review. Wikipedia says flesh was thrown up to about 800 feet from the site, and that large pieces landed near buildings and in parking lots.

The Car

One enormous piece of blubber came down on a nearly new Oldsmobile belonging to Walter Umenhofer, the spectator who had questioned the amount of dynamite. The car was parked roughly a quarter mile from the blast, well outside the area officials expected to be dangerous. The falling debris crushed the roof and severely damaged the vehicle. Fortunately, nobody was inside. Accounts differ on the exact Oldsmobile model, but the damage itself was well documented by witnesses and journalists.

There was an almost unbelievable coincidence: the dealership where Umenhofer had purchased the car advertised with the slogan "We'll make you a whale of a deal." The Siuslaw News recorded his reaction in 1970: "My insurance company will never believe it." In a 1995 interview with the Eugene Register-Guard, Umenhofer confirmed that the state eventually reimbursed him for the destroyed vehicle. The failed disposal operation had turned an ordinary parked car into one of the strangest pieces of evidence imaginable.

The Cleanup

Scavengers did not appear. Wikipedia and Mental Floss both say the birds stayed away for some time, possibly because the noise and smell had scared them off. Most of the carcass stayed on the beach, and highway crews with a bulldozer buried it. Mental Floss says smaller pieces were discarded or covered with sand. Willamette Week reports that the roughly ten minutes of raw KATU footage includes a bulldozer pushing the carcass into a sand pit.

Thornton, in a quote Offbeat Oregon takes from the Eugene Register-Guard, said the blast "went just exactly right" but that it funneled a hole under the whale. He was promoted to the Medford office about six months later, according to Offbeat Oregon and Wikipedia, and Mental Floss says he refused to discuss the incident for years.

From Local News to Internet Legend

The report was a local story for years, shown again from time to time and passed around on videotape. On May 20, 1990, the Miami Herald published Dave Barry's column about it, titled "Moby Yuck" according to the Oregon Encyclopedia. Barry wrote that he was "absolutely not making this incident up; in fact, I have it all on videotape." A shortened version spread across early online communities, and some readers took it for fresh news. ODOT's public information officer, Ed Shoaps, told the Oregon Encyclopedia that people called to ask why the state had just blown up a whale, and he later called it the "first story to go viral on the Internet."

Barry himself says on his Substack that he has loved the story since first seeing a video of Linnman's report in 1990. Linnman wrote a book about it, The Exploding Whale, in 2003, according to Offbeat Oregon.

The Aftermath in Oregon

The next time the state faced a mass whale death, it did not try dynamite. When 41 sperm whales stranded and died south of Florence in 1979, the Oregon Encyclopedia says dynamite was considered and rejected, and the carcasses were buried. Wikipedia adds that state parks officials burned and buried them, and that Oregon State Parks today buries carcasses where they land or relocates them if the sand is not deep enough.

In June 2020, after residents chose from nine finalists out of more than 120 suggestions, Florence named a small park on the Siuslaw River "Exploding Whale Memorial Park," according to Global News. For the 50th anniversary, the Oregon Historical Society, which has had the 16-millimeter KATU print in its care since the 1980s according to Willamette Week, released a 4K restoration of Brazil's film on November 10, 2020. KATU says the footage was converted to 4K by the Oregon Historical Society, and that the two released it jointly.

A whale lay stranded by the sea,
The state declared, "We've got the key!"
The dynamite began to roar—
And scattered blubber across the shore.

The exploding whale was not a major political event, and it did not lead to a technological breakthrough. It lasts because it is a clean example of how people fail. Officials faced an unfamiliar problem and reached for a tool they understood. Dynamite breaks a boulder because stone is brittle. A whale is mostly soft tissue, and it came apart into big pieces that flew a long way before they came down.

It is also a lesson in how fortunate the ending was. A piece of blubber that crushed a car roof could have killed someone on the dunes. No one was killed, and so the story could be funny. It also survived because a television crew filmed it, and the film and the newspaper reports kept anyone from dismissing it as an urban legend. Reality, in this case, was stranger than the rumor.

Sources

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