Side rant: Their ad-tracking cookie opt-out is the epitome of a dark design pattern. It took over 2 minutes to run. Including saying "done" in a pop out and the only leaving a cancel button for another 15 seconds. There's absolutely zero reason it should take even 1/10th of that time, other than purposefully bad UX.
KATU, this local news site, are the ones who not only produced the original segment, but 50 years later, worked with the historical society to restore and digitally remaster the original film. Their article contains context and retrospective commentary.
edit: to be clear, just explaining why I submitted the link rather than the Youtube link. I don't endorse dark patterned ad code, though I've tried opening the link in a couple of incognito browsers and didn't run into any issues.
Looks like I ended up being in the wrong then. This morning when I read it, the article embedded the high-res Youtube video (which you could also click to view directly on Youtube) at the bottom of the article. Looks like that at some point today, they've removed the Youtube embed for their own player:
The remastered 'chunky text' is a bit jarring and incongruent on the 4k version. It's just too sharp to be placed on film stock with that much grain. And then there's the issue of ruining the footage with these burned-in overlays (countdown, really?)
Much like those proposals for constructs that would warn people of the dangers of radioactive waste for 10,000 years, this video has served as warning for 50 years about what not to do with a dead whale on the beach. With the remastering, perhaps it can still continue its mission for many more years to come.
If you use uBlock Origin with the annoyances filter you don't see any of that. As far as cookies, you can just use something like Vanilla cookie that will clear them outside of the one's you want to keep. Unfortunately the browsers dont let them clear the other storages, but at least you wont have the cookies following you.
It's even darker, after those two minutes it told me some advertisers can't receive the opt out by https so it wasn't actually submitted, and to follow another link.
thanks, though I still fail to see how is it remastered, after remastering it looks like 1970s recording should look like and the original video certainly ain't up to 1970s standards
The 1970 event remained little-known until in 1990 Dave Barry wrote about it[1], and it became really well-known thanks to the internet in 1993 or so when (part of) this article[2] “went viral” on bulletin boards.
The engineer in charge of the explosion, George Thornton, insisted that the operation was an overall success, and got promoted after this event [3]:
> "I said to my supervisors, usually when something happens like this, the person ends up getting promoted," Thornton added. "Sure enough, about six months later, I got promoted to Medford."
I see some debate about whether the amount of explosive used was too much or too little; apparently (thanks to following one of the citations from Wikipedia) it was both:
> Umenhofer had received explosives training during his World War II service and what he saw on the beach that day made him very, very nervous. He knew project manager George Thornton was not going to get the results he wanted — he either needed a lot less dynamite, so that the whale would just be pushed out to sea, or a whole lot more, so that it would be torn into tiny pieces. Umenhofer told the Springfield paper he tried to warn Thornton but was blown off.
"A military veteran with explosives training who happened to be in the area warned that the planned twenty cases of dynamite was far too much, and that 20 sticks (8.4 lb or 3.8 kg) would have sufficed, but his advice went unheeded.
. . .
The explosives-expert veteran's brand-new automobile, purchased during a "Get a Whale of a Deal" promotion in a nearby city, was flattened by a chunk of falling blubber."
I'm paraphrasing here, but "we think it will work, but the only problem is we don't know how much dynamite to use" strikes me as the statement of a man who was offered a job that he would, under no circumstances, say no to, including the particular circumstance where he has no idea how to do that job. Can't say I would behave much differently in that situation, though.
Unsurprising, perhaps, that such a Whale of a Tale has inspired several songs. The best of those I can find online is 'The Exploding Whale Song' by Dan Tanz[0], but my all time favorite is Kay Shapero's 'Blubber'[1].
I'm thinking a trebuchet could be built onsite, straddling the carcass and facing the ocean. Then schoolchildren could use buckets to fill the counterweight box with wet sand. Seems like a nice STEM activity.
"Currently, Oregon State Parks Department policy is to bury whale carcasses where they land. If the sand is not deep enough, they are relocated to another beach."
Until at least about 20 years ago when I lived there, on the coast of France, the whales were simply buried under sand until they were decomposed, and then dug up.
Even just getting excavators on to a beach can be risky.
Near where I used to live they were using an excavator to move some sand. The tide caught one. It started to sink. They sent in another. You can guess what happened next.
Marine salvage operations can do it. In fact about 21 years ago, a 650 foot ship (the New Carissa) grounded on the beach about 50 miles south of the whale location. It broke apart, but the salvors were able to float and tow a 440 foot section back out to sea to sink it.
All things are possible with sufficiently large heavy machinery, but that's an interesting comparison because what they had to work with when salvaging that ship was not actively decomposing.
There actually are trash dumpsters large enough to hold this whale. I'm not sure it'd be necessary to tow it out to sea, but maybe that's not as hard as it seems to someone like me who doesn't know the process.
You wouldn't need a crane. Lay out nylon straps on the beach, push or roll it onto the straps with an end loader, secure the straps around it and push it the rest of the way into the water.
Once it's in the water and floating you can pull it from a boat 50 meters away if you need to.
How? I image that some kind of net could be made to attach to a tug and haul out to sea, but such a thing would have to be custom made to handle a 50 ton whale on sand.
Here's an idea: loop several thin wires around the carcass, connect them to a tractor and pull... Should break it down quite easily into several moveable chunks.
One difference I noticed from my memory of watching it 20 years ago is in the original video there was a delay between the visual of the explosion and the audio, which makes sense because of the distance. In this version, they appear to have synced them up.
A cult classic. This whole thing looks like something out of a cartoon. I especially love the shot of the cart with boxes of dynamite haphazardly thrown together and someone's leg resting on top of it.
This video was a huge part of my early internet and computing experience around ~1996 as a low resolution quicktime. Seeing it in high quality, seeing people's faces, it's surreal. It's also a lot more gory than in low resolution.
Does anyone know why they decided to blow up the whale? I mean, the consequences should have been obvious to anyone. Where did they expect the pieces to go?
Perhaps the assumption was that many small pieces would be easier to clean up than one big piece. And that the very small pieces would be removed by other animals, or the weather.
Apparently they vastly overestimated how much explosive to use, resulting in the now infamous consequences.
"The decision to blow up the whale came from the Oregon Department of Transportation and George Thornton. According to Linnman, Thornton had consulted with the United State Navy, which had done things like this in the past. The general consensus from all involved after the explosion was that not enough dynamite was used."
The whale carcass was beginning to rot, which meant a massive stink. So they decided to blast it into pieces that could be eaten by seagulls... only that this plan failed and the chunks were too big.
8 tons of whale mince is going to need a hell of a lot of seagull. Just poking a hole or three in it to let the gasses out then hauling it into the sea seems an option ( but IANA whale carcass disposal expert)
Don't ask me :D I just took the info from the article.
On the other side, given I'm half Croatian, seagulls and other meat-eating birds will absolutely devour that meat in no time - they will lead other flocks of birds to the food source.
If it wasn't a crowded/ popular-ish beach (not LA crowded, Oregon Coast crowded), it would have likely been fine. The big problem was the fact that they have a bunch of spectators who were parked within the blast range.
Side rant: Their ad-tracking cookie opt-out is the epitome of a dark design pattern. It took over 2 minutes to run. Including saying "done" in a pop out and the only leaving a cancel button for another 15 seconds. There's absolutely zero reason it should take even 1/10th of that time, other than purposefully bad UX.