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Honolulu Lite
HAWAII blew a golden opportunity for worldwide free publicity when officials decided to simply bury that huge rotting whale on the Big Island last week. We missed a
whale of a taleA Honolulu Lite reader alerted me to a couple of Web sites dedicated to a famous rotting whale incident in Oregon in 1970 that has become part of American folklore.
It seems that residents of Florence, Ore., woke up one November morning to discover an enormous sperm whale had beached itself. Pictures on the Internet of the creature look very much like photos last week of the 30-ton dead whale at Hapuna. So, I guess, you see one big rotting whale, you've seen 'em all.
In 1970, Oregon's beaches were under the jurisdiction of the state highway department. I don't know why. I do recall in college happily driving on miles and miles of empty beaches. I also recall getting stuck in the sand quite a few times so, you're right, the idea of treating beaches like roads is stupid.
In any case, it was up to the highway department to get rid of the whale, a task apparently not covered in the highway department handbook. Highway department people are good at removing tons of snow but rarely are faced with having to remove multi-ton mammals from state highways.
The highway officials apparently mulled the whale problem for sometime before deciding to treat the whale like something they had dealt with before, namely a large boulder. (You know where we are going with this, right?)
The way Oregon highway officials dealt with boulders was to blow them up. So they dragged a half-ton of dynamite onto the beach and snuggled it up against the 45-foot long whale. They figured the whale would be blown into small bits, which would then be consumed by sea gulls and crabs. For highway guys, it seemed like a sound plan.
THEY made everyone on the beach back up a safe distance. By then, there was a nice little crowd of people on hand, including newspaper reporters and television reporter Paul Linnman from Portland, who, bless him, brought along a camera. The spectators were excited. It's not everyday you get to see a whale blown up.
To get the sense of what happened next, I defer to my colleague Dave Barry, who first wrote about the incident 10 years ago.
"First you see the whale carcass disappear in a huge blast of smoke and flame," Barry wrote. "Then you hear the happy spectators shouting 'Yayy!' and 'Whee!' Then, suddenly, the crowd's tone changes. You hear a new sound like 'splud.' You hear a woman's voice shouting 'Here comes pieces of ... MY GOD!' Something smears the camera lens."
What happened was the sky began to rain huge hunks of blubber and people ran for their lives.
"For the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds," blurbed Mr. Linnman.
One piece caved in the roof of a car more than a quarter mile away.
Needless to say, even the Oregon coast doesn't breed crabs and birds large enough to clean up after a mess like that. The highway department apparently had to do it the old-fashioned way, with snow plows.
The whale explosion put Florence on the map. You can't buy publicity like that. So we missed a major news coup by burying our dead whale.
(To see actual tape of the Oregon incident, type "exploding whale" in any Internet search engine.)
http://www.explodingwhale.com
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
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71224.113@compuserve.com.
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