Oregon’s Exploding Whale: The Dynamite, the Footage, and Florence

On November 12, 1970, the Oregon State Highway Division detonated roughly a half-ton of dynamite under a 45-foot, eight-ton sperm whale carcass on a beach near Florence, hoping to disintegrate it into pieces small enough for scavengers. The Oregon exploding whale instead became a shower of massive blubber chunks that rained down on spectators a quarter mile away, flattened a parked Oldsmobile, and left the beach to be cleaned up by hand. No one was hurt. A local news crew caught the whole thing on 16mm film, and decades later the clip became one of the earliest videos to go viral on the internet.

Why the Highway Division Was in Charge of a Dead Whale

The whale washed ashore on November 9, 1970, about a mile south of the Siuslaw River in what is now the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area.¹ It began rotting almost immediately, and the job of removing it fell to the Oregon State Highway Division, the predecessor of today’s Oregon Department of Transportation.

That jurisdiction came from an unusual piece of state law. In 1913, under Governor Oswald West, the Oregon legislature designated the wet-sand portions of the state’s beaches as a public highway.² The 1967 Oregon Beach Bill extended public access rights up to the vegetation line, and the Highway Division remained responsible for managing the shore.³ An eight-ton carcass on a state highway was a highway problem, so highway engineers handled it.

The Decision to Use Dynamite

The assignment went to George Thornton, an assistant district highway engineer. By later accounts, it landed on his desk partly because his colleagues had conveniently scheduled a deer hunting trip.⁴ Thornton consulted the U.S. Navy and munitions experts before settling on a plan.¹

Other options had already been ruled out. Towing the whale back out to sea would likely just send it back on the next tide. Burying it on the beach would not hold, because wave action would uncover the carcass. Burning something that large and waterlogged was impractical. Rendering plants would not take it.⁴ Thornton decided to treat the whale like a boulder: blast it apart, and let seagulls, crabs, and other scavengers finish the job on the small pieces.⁵

Workers stacked twenty cases of dynamite, about a half-ton, on the landward side of the carcass, expecting the blast to push the debris out toward the ocean. Thornton told reporters before the detonation that he was “confident that it’ll work,” while also acknowledging “some uncertainty over how much dynamite to use.”⁵

What Happened When the Dynamite Went Off

The detonation launched a column of sand and whale roughly a hundred feet into the air.¹ Spectators and reporters had positioned themselves about a quarter mile from the blast, a distance that proved wildly insufficient. Rather than disintegrating, the whale broke into huge chunks that fell across the surrounding area.⁶

The most spectacular casualty was an Oldsmobile 98 belonging to Walter Umenhofer. A piece of blubber described as the size of a coffee table came down on the car and completely flattened its roof.⁶ Umenhofer had military demolition experience and had actually parked farther away than most onlookers because he suspected the charges were “improperly placed and overloaded.” He told the Eugene Register-Guard, “They’re just lucky they didn’t kill somebody.” The Pacific Indemnity Group, which insured the Highway Division, paid him the full retail value of the car, which he called “very satisfactory.”⁷

No spectators were injured. The smell of whale reportedly stayed with those present for days.⁶ Highway crews had to collect and bury the chunks the blast had failed to reduce. One retired ODOT employee reportedly earned a promotion after being assigned to blubber cleanup duty.⁸

How the Footage Survived and Spread

The event might have faded into local lore if Paul Linnman, a 23-year-old reporter for Portland’s KATU-TV, and cameraman Doug Brazil had not been on the beach that day. Brazil shot the detonation on 16mm color reversal film, and both men had to run as dense pieces of whale flesh came down around them.⁹ Linnman’s narration produced the line that still travels with the clip: “The blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds.”¹ The footage aired on KATU and ran the following week on ABC’s Weekend News with Sam Donaldson. Linnman was paid $117 for the network sale.

The second life came in May 1990, when humor columnist Dave Barry wrote about the Florence whale in his syndicated Miami Herald column, insisting to skeptical readers, “I am absolutely not making this incident up; in fact I have it all on videotape.”¹⁰ An abridged version of the column was posted to an electronic bulletin board. Readers who thought the explosion had just happened began calling the Oregon Department of Transportation in protest. ODOT public information officer Ed Shoaps fielded the calls and later described the episode to NPR as the “first story to go viral on the Internet.”¹ The agency had to publish a follow-up confirming the details.

By the mid-1990s the video itself was circulating on Usenet groups, including alt.animals.whales. KATU did not have the original footage at that point, so copies went out on VHS tapes by mail. One account put it this way: the video went viral “before the internet had the infrastructure to support viral videos, when mailing a six minute clip via USPS was faster than downloading.” YouTube and social media accelerated things further. A 2006 BBC study ranked the Oregon exploding whale footage as the fifth most-watched video on the internet, with an estimated 350 million views at the time.¹¹

What Oregon Does With Beached Whales Now

Nothing like the Florence approach is current practice. When forty-one sperm whales beached along the Oregon coast in 1979, the possibility of dynamite was “quickly passed over” in favor of burial.¹ Oregon’s current policy is to bury beached whale carcasses in the sand where they wash ashore, and beach management has shifted from the highway agency to the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department.¹² There is no formal disposal service for decomposing carcasses; the Parks Department may send a ranger to bury one if it becomes a public concern, and in some cases carcasses are simply left to decay.¹³

Federal law changed too. The Marine Mammal Protection Act, enacted in 1972, established federal protections and made it illegal for unauthorized people to handle marine mammals.¹⁴ Strandings in Oregon are now handled through a coordinated network involving NOAA Fisheries, the Oregon Marine Mammal Stranding Network at Oregon State University, and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.¹⁵

How Florence Remembers the Blast

Florence has embraced the story. In June 2020 the city opened the Exploding Whale Memorial Park on Rhododendron Drive in the Historic Old Town district. The name came out of a city-sponsored “Name the Park” contest, and the project was funded through grants from the Land and Water Conservation Fund and the Oregon State Parks’ Local Government Grant Program.¹⁶ The park overlooks the Siuslaw River and dunes, with picnic shelters, walking paths, and river access.¹⁷

The 50th anniversary in November 2020 drew attention despite pandemic restrictions. The Oregon Historical Society hosted a virtual conversation between Linnman and OHS executive director Kerry Tymchuk and released a new 4K scan of the original 16mm KATU film.¹⁸ Locally, residents held a community memorial, and Homegrown Public House and Brewery released an Exploding Whale Pale Ale for the occasion. The Siuslaw Pioneer Museum in Florence keeps a permanent exhibit that includes whale bones salvaged from the original site and a monitor playing the KATU footage on loop.¹⁹

1
Oregon Encyclopedia. Florence Whale Explosion
2
Oregon Encyclopedia. Oregon Beach Bill
3
Oregon Secretary of State. Landmark Legislation: Oregon Beach Bill
4
The Oregonian. George Thornton, the ODOT Engineer Behind the Exploding Whale
5
NPR. Man Behind Oregon’s Famous Exploding Whale Dies
6
Oregon Historical Society. Beached Whale Blow Up
7
The Exploding Whale. Register-Guard Article, November 23, 1970
8
The Exploding Whale. Oregon’s Exploding Whale, 50 Years Later
9
The Exploding Whale. An Extended Conversation With Paul Linnman
10
The Oregonian. Oregon’s Exploding Whale, 50 Years Later
11
Vice. The History of Exploding Whales Is the History of the Internet Itself
12
Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development. Public Access to the Oregon Coast
13
Oregon State University. What To Do if You Find a Marine Mammal Ashore in Oregon
14
NOAA Fisheries. National Marine Mammal Stranding Response Network
15
NOAA Fisheries. West Coast Marine Mammal Stranding Network
16
The News Tribune. Florence, Oregon Names Park After Exploding Whale
17
City of Florence. Exploding Whale Memorial Park
18
Oregon Historical Society. The 50th Anniversary of Blasted Blubber
19
The Register-Guard. 50th Anniversary Exploding Whale