Exploding Whales
You can, if you try, find videos online or offline, of exploding whales. Below are two well documented incidents of exploding whales that may or may not have been directly influenced by humans.
Florence, Oregon
One of the best known incidents is the 1970 Oregon Whale Explosion. A sperm whale, weighing eight tons and being 14 meters long, was beached on the Oregon Coast. Since just burying a whale was inefficient, they decided to blow it up with half a ton of dynamite. Imagine being loaded with almost 1/15 of your body weight in dynamite and being blown up because they were too lazy to bury you. For the average American male, that would be 15-25 pounds of dynamite. Ouch.
They blew up the whale, which disintegrated to some extent. Some of the whale was left intact, which the Coast Guard and Highway Patrol cleared away later. The blubber that was blown up, on the other hand, flew many hundred feet away. A large chunk of blubber almost wrecked a stationary car, and certainly caused much more damage.
The people involved decided, when many whales washed up on a different coast, they would just burn and bury the whales. That’s what they got for being lazy. At least they learned their lesson.
Tainan, Taiwan
But, that whale was intentionally blown up. Imagine if a whale just spontaneously blew up during the middle of the day. Well, that happened. In 2004, in Tainan, Taiwan a decomposing sperm whale that was almost 50 tons suddenly exploded due to gas build-up inside the carcass. It took Taiwanese forces 13 hours, three cranes, and 50 workers to shift the giant whale onto a truck to dispose of it.
The explosion was supposedly spectacular. It splattered blood and entrails all over the city, and caused a garnered a huge amount of International attention. More than 600 residents of Tainan, along with various food, drink, and service vendors watched the servicemen haul the giant away. The temperatures were supposedly ‘bitterly cold’, along with heavy winds, but nevertheless, it was a surprisingly popular random event.
There were many other events that included exploding whales, but these two were the most internationally popular and the best documented I could find.
This the the Nightly Rambler, signing off.
Leave a Reply