Happy botched whale corpse disposal day to you and yours.

Just last year, Florence Mayor Rob Ward stood in front of a small crowd at Exploding Whale Memorial Park to announce that the whole month of November in 2024 would be “the month to memorialize the exploding whale.”

If you’re confused, allow us to clear it up for you.

On November 12, 1970, officials on the Oregon coast were facing a whale of a problem: a sperm whale corpse had washed up on shore.

It was huge, it smelled and was attracting wildlife as it began to rot. The question of whether the whale carcass would blow up on its own as a product of putrefaction, a process of decomposition that can cause a gas build up, was on officials’ minds, too.

So, authorities turned to 20 cases of dynamite. The hope was that the explosiv

See Full Page