Back in 1970, Oregon highway workers had the horrible task of trying to figure out how to get rid of a 45-foot long, 8-ton whale carcass from a beach in Florence.
They decided to obliterate it using 20 cases — half a ton — of dynamite.
“The hope was that the long-dead Pacific gray whale would be almost disintegrated by the blast, and that any small pieces still around after the explosion would be taken care of by seagulls and other scavengers,” explained KATU’s Paul Linnman, in what New York Times reporter Mike Baker calls “surely one of the greatest local TV news segments of the century.” And not because things went as planned.
The blast was so powerful, that vehicles parked over a quarter mile away were crushed by falling debris!
You can watch the explosion below.