The Whale That Exploded Twice

In 1970, Oregon's highway department decided the fastest way to get rid of a beached whale was half a ton of dynamite. The footage sat forgotten for twenty years — until it exploded a second time, in front of an audience that hadn't even existed yet.

On the morning of November 9, 1970, a dead whale washed up on a beach a few miles south of Florence, Oregon, and nobody in the state government had the faintest idea what to do about it.

It was not a small problem. The animal — a sperm whale, though early newspaper reports misidentified it as a gray whale — measured about forty-five feet long and weighed somewhere around eight tons. It had settled onto a stretch of public sand on the central Oregon coast, and under Oregon law, the beaches belonged to the state. That made the rotting carcass, officially and inescapably, the problem of the Oregon State Highway Division, the agency that at the time had jurisdiction over the coastline.

The division had a real dilemma on its hands, and it had nothing to do with sentiment. An eight-ton carcass left to decompose in the open would eventually split under its own buildup of gas, and in the meantime it would draw crowds of curious beachgoers who might climb on it, slip into the muck, or get hurt some other way nobody could fully predict. Burying it was impractical at that size. Towing it back out to sea and hoping it wouldn’t just wash up again somewhere else wasn’t much better. Someone needed to make it go away, and the job landed on the desk of a highway engineer named George Thornton.

Thornton was not an explosives expert, and by his own later account, that was sort of the point. Asked years afterward why he’d been chosen to run the operation, he said it was because his supervisor happened to be out deer hunting that week. With the boss unavailable, the assignment fell to Thornton, who consulted with the U.S. Navy — which had prior experience using explosives on stranded whales, generally smaller ones, to break them into pieces manageable enough for scavenging birds and marine life to finish off — and settled on a plan: bury a load of dynamite on the ocean side of the carcass and blow it into pieces small enough that the gulls, crabs, and tide would clean up the rest within days. It must have sounded, on paper, like a tidy solution. Thornton would later admit he wasn’t entirely sure how much dynamite the job called for. The number that got buried next to the whale was half a ton — roughly a thousand pounds of explosive charge, set against an animal that was, essentially, an enormous sack of blubber, oil, and gas-distended tissue.

Word got around Florence that the state was going to blow up the whale, and a crowd gathered on the dunes to watch, kept back what everyone assumed was a safe distance. A Portland television station, KATU, sent a twenty-three-year-old reporter named Paul Linnman and a cameraman, Doug Brazil, down the coast to film it. Nobody involved seems to have treated the assignment as especially weighty; it had the shape of a quirky local news segment, a few seconds of boom and then a tidy ending.

At 3:45 p.m. on November 12, Thornton gave the signal, and the charge went off.

What happened next did not look anything like the plan. Rather than disintegrating into bite-sized, scavenger-friendly fragments, the whale came apart in slabs — some of them enormous, flung by the blast into a ballistic arc that carried pieces of blubber as far as 800 feet from the detonation site. Linnman’s live narration captured the moment the crowd’s amusement curdled into alarm: “The humor of the entire situation suddenly gave way to a run for survival,” he reported, as people on the dunes scattered to avoid being hit by falling chunks of meat raining out of the sky. Astonishingly, nobody in the crowd was seriously hurt. The same could not be said for the cars in the parking area. A roughly 300-pound piece of blubber came down out of the sky and landed squarely on the roof of a brand-new Oldsmobile 98 belonging to a man named Walter Umenhofer, parked a quarter mile from the blast — well outside what anyone had judged the danger zone to be. The impact caved the roof in so completely that it pushed the back of the front seats down to the floor. “That was one big piece of blubber,” Umenhofer said afterward. “It hit so hard that it bent my roof down and pushed the back of the seats to the floor.”

And then there was the part that made the whole exercise almost pointless: most of the whale didn’t disintegrate at all. The explosion scattered enough flesh to coat the beach and the nearby cars and bystanders in a layer of stinking debris, but the bulk of the carcass remained more or less where it had started, large and intact enough that Highway Division crews still had to come back afterward and haul it away using the ordinary methods — the exact labor the dynamite had been meant to avoid. The whale had been bombed, and the beach still needed cleaning up.

Umenhofer did eventually get his car paid for. A local paper covering the aftermath ran the story under the headline “Flying Blubber Claim Paid,” confirming that the state had settled with him for the damage — a small, almost bureaucratic coda to an afternoon that had otherwise gone spectacularly off script.

Thornton, for his part, seemed to regard the whole affair with something between resignation and dark humor for the rest of his life. He rarely spoke publicly about it, reportedly observing once that every time he agreed to be interviewed about the exploding whale, “it blew up in my face” all over again — a joke that worked a little too well, since it became true in a much more literal sense than he probably intended when he first made it.

That might have been the entire story: a bizarre, briefly newsworthy bungle by a state agency, filed away in the Oregon Highway Division’s list of things not to try again, remembered locally as the kind of story people tell at bars on the coast. For about two decades, that is essentially what it was. The footage aired once on Portland television, got some regional attention and a few wire mentions, and then faded into obscurity outside Oregon. Linnman stayed in local news. Thornton went back to his engineering work. The case of the exploding whale seemed destined to live and die as a regional anecdote, the kind of thing that shows up in the sidebar of a hometown paper’s anniversary retrospective and nowhere else.

Then, in the spring of 1990, nearly twenty years after the blast, the story detonated for a second time — in a completely different way, in front of an audience that had never heard of it, and at a moment when almost nobody expected a two-decade-old regional news clip to go anywhere at all.

Humor columnist Dave Barry, whose work ran in the Miami Herald and was syndicated to newspapers across the country, got hold of a copy of the KATU footage — by his own account, a “pirated” tape that had been circulating informally among people who’d stumbled across it — and wrote it up in a column published on May 20, 1990, under the title “The Farside Comes to Life in Oregon.” Barry’s description of the footage, written with his usual deadpan incredulity, did for the exploding whale what the original news segment alone never managed: it gave the story a second life, in front of an audience of millions of newspaper readers who had never set foot in Florence, Oregon, and had no memory of the original 1970 broadcast.

What happened after that is, in its own way, almost as strange as the explosion itself. This was 1990, several years before the World Wide Web existed as something ordinary people used. But Barry’s column — or increasingly, abridged and unattributed versions of it, stripped of context about when or where the event had actually happened — began circulating on dial-up bulletin board systems (BBSes), the pre-web, pre-email networks where early computer users traded text files, jokes, and stories. Copies of the column, often missing any indication that the event was twenty years old, spread from board to board as a kind of digital chain letter, read by people who, in many cases, assumed it must be a recent news story. Eventually actual video copies of the KATU footage followed the same path, dubbed from tape to tape and later digitized, passed along by people who had no connection to Oregon, Paul Linnman, or George Thornton, and who were often encountering the story for the first time with no sense that it had already happened once, to total indifference, when most of them were in grade school. By the time the footage reached the broader internet in the mid-to-late 1990s, it had already acquired a kind of folkloric half-life — repeatedly rediscovered, repeatedly treated as breaking news, by people who had no idea they were the latest in a long line of people having exactly that same reaction.

It is genuinely difficult to find an earlier candidate for the thing people now call “the first viral video.” The footage met every informal criterion of the genre before the genre had a name: it was short, visually absurd, impossible to adequately describe secondhand, and it kept being passed hand-to-hand by people who felt compelled to share it with someone else the moment they saw it — first on paper, then on BBSes, then over the open internet, decades after the event itself was over and the man responsible had moved on with his life. Each hop seemed to strip away a little more context. A reader forwarding a text file to a friend on another board had no particular reason to note the date, and the people receiving it had even less reason to ask; it simply read as news, the way almost anything typed in the present tense does. By the time clips of Linnman’s broadcast were circulating as early web video files in the mid-1990s, a sizeable share of the people watching them seem to have believed they were looking at something that had happened recently, somewhere nearby, to someone else’s bad luck.

Florence, Oregon, eventually came around to embracing the whole episode rather than burying it. The city now marks “Exploding Whale Day” around the anniversary each November, and in 2020 — fifty years after the blast — residents were invited to help choose a name for a new park built at the site of the explosion. Out of 856 submissions, 439 people voted for the same name: Exploding Whale Memorial Park. It is, as far as anyone can tell, the only municipal park in the United States named for a failed explosives operation that most of its visitors first heard about from a humor columnist two decades after the fact, by way of a bulletin board post nobody could trace back to its source.

George Thornton died in October 2013, at eighty-four, having spent much of his later life fielding occasional calls from reporters wanting him to relive the one afternoon in 1970 that refused to stay in the past. He never got the chance to see it fade away for good. Neither, really, has anyone else — the clip keeps finding new audiences who assume they’re the first ones to find it, which might be the strangest part of the whole story: an explosion that was supposed to clean up a beach in an afternoon instead went off in slow motion for more than fifty years, and it still hasn’t entirely stopped.

The Whale That Exploded Twice

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