A real classic! What wasn’t featured in the original news story was a passerby who had demolitions experience in the army in Vietnam. He approached the guy in charge of the job and explained that this would never work because when you detonate explosives in sand like they were going to, instead of blowing the whale entirely out to sea laterally, the blast would create a cone of explosive force straight upward and shear off massive chucks of whale hundreds of feet into the air, while leaving half the carcass basically untouched. Here’s a 25 year anniversary retrospective with some extra bits of fun info.
I don’t understand why they didn’t come at high tide and tow it miles out to sea using a couple tugboats. No dismemberment necessary, just a big strap around the tail-fin. Once miles from shore, the whale could be lanced to release the decomposition gasses and allow it to sink naturally where it could benefit the sea floor for decades. If they’d gone maybe 50ish miles offshore, that would have been proper deep sea abyssal zone and perfect for a whalefall.
I don’t understand why they didn’t come at high tide and tow it miles out to sea using a couple tugboats.
Cuz we want big boom
I guess it depends on how far gone the whale is. If you are only strapping the tail, it may slough off and leave the bulk of the whale behind.
When all you’ve got is a
hammercrate of dynamite everything starts to look like anailwhale
“Blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds.”
Known as BBBaBB
I’m pretty sure this was the first Internet video I ever saw back in the nineties on good ole real player on a postage stamp sized playing screen.
I was there, in the long long ago.
“Trust me buddy, you’ll never need more than 4KB of RAM!”
(The salesman trying to sell my old boss a computer)
It was definitely one of the first videos I remember going viral on email, back when you often had to figure out what codecs or player you needed before you could watch anything.
That dead whale never stood a chance
Man the damage done to those cars! And I mean there’s more steel in a single one of them than 20 German tanks! You’d be a pancake if a big piece hit you.
Gotta say, they were lucky no injuries.
Hey Lois remember that time I helped a whale back into the ocean with a forklift?
Minor league baseball team took full advantage of this a while back.
If I’ve learned anything from video games, it’s that they needed to use Claymores.
Claymore will just punch it full of holes.
What a terrible, terrible idea…
Good, old, innocent news. I am nostalgic.
“gotta nuke something”
It hasn’t really been fifty years has it?
