Exploding Whale Day - 50 Years Ago Today

 FLORENCE, Ore. - A 45-foot, 8-ton whale washed up on the beach near Florence on Nov. 9, 1970.

Three days later, the whale's tale exploded into history - and became what some people regard as the first-ever viral story.

"It had to be said the Oregon State Highway Department not only had a whale of a problem on its hands," Paul Linnman reported for KATU more than a half century ago. "It had a stinking whale of a problem."

"So dynamite it was, some 20 cases or a half ton of it," he said. "The hope was that the long-dead pacific gray whale would be almost disintegrated by the blast."

"After they blew it up, everyone is watching in awe, and then 30 seconds later - blam blam blam - then everyone's going, 'There's huge chunks of whale blubber getting thrown on us,'" Umenhofer said in 2015.

The plan was to obliterate the whale into tiny pieces that seagulls would eat.

But as Linnman and former KATU Photojournalist Doug Brazil found out, the pieces were not exactly bite-sized.

The two had to run to escape the flying blubber.

One chunk of airborne blubber proved so big it flattened a car.

"It might be concluded that should a whale ever wash ashore in Lane County again, those in charge will not only remember what to do," Linnman said in his now infamous report, "they'll certainly remember what not to do."

I remember that one; talk about a huge mess! There was blubber flying everywhere. Bystanders were running away, but couldn't escape from the blubber that was raining down on them. One chunk was so big that it crushed a guy's new car when the blubber fell from the sky. The state hasn't blow up a dead whale since.