The Exploding Whale remastered: 50th anniversary of legendary Oregon event | Hacker News Reader

The Exploding Whale remastered: 50th anniversary of legendary Oregon event

katu.com

209 pointsdanso74 comments

Direct link to the video without the shitty local news site: https://youtu.be/V6CLumsir34

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.

The KATU video seems to be limited to 360p max for me. The YouTube link is the remastered quality that the article seems to be describing.

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:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps...

The KATU video is from the remastered video, the previous versions of the video were all bad U-Matic transfers.

You can tell the difference by the on screen text, the U-Matic transfers had, in layman terms, chunky text.

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?)

Right.. probably one of the worst I've come across. Finally got me to make the effort to install a browser extension. Seems to be doing the trick. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/i-dont-care-about-...

It's not just a shitty local news site, it's part of Sinclair Broadcast Group, the epitome of scummy, society-destroying media.

What better way to show the value of adblockers, host file, ublock etc to people that might otherwise think they're unnecessary.

Aaanyway... how about that whale?

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.

I didn't see any of this, and I have no plugins installed. Perhaps my hostfile blocked it: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

That js popup actually got an audible laugh from me. Left me curious as to whether it triggered it if you just accept all the cookies.

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.

And then it didn't load the actual content...

plus, opting out will set hundreds of "no thank you" cookies with all their 3rd party tracker, if I understand correctly.

I closed the page without reading/viewing, and came here to rant about it. Thanks for being first. :)

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

Wikipedia has an article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_whale

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.

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/magazine/19...

[2]: https://www.theexplodingwhale.com/evidence/resources/dave-ba...

[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20110717092953/http://tafkac.org...

From the Wikipedia article about the event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_whale

"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."

The irony . . .

Walt Umenhofer, the military veteran mentioned, was a friend of my father’s. Walt also owned a drivable tank. No joke.

Interesting! :-)

Also hope his insurance covered the damage from the falling whale blubber. Quite unique car damage! :-)

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.

Ah. Memories of downloading a 320x256 mpeg of this in the 90s :)

Exactly. This video is one of my first great Internet memories and I had a saved copy on my computer for years.

Yup, RealVideo represent!

Buffering...

Maybe the first internet viral video? I think I got it on Gopher.

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].

[0] https://youtu.be/cR3JcMblV0o

[1] Lyrics only, unfortunately: http://www.kayshapero.net/kaysongs.htm#Blubber

It also seems to be the inspiration for the end of the Aussie movie Swinging Safari (2018), one of my favorite quirky movies in the last few years.

> It also seems to be the inspiration for the end of the Aussie movie Swinging Safari (2018), one of my favorite quirky movies in the last few years.

I'll check that out. Thanks for the recommendation!

I wrote the original Wikipedia article, for which I received the Oddball Barnstar.

Does anyone know what the current official solution is for a smelly whale carcass stuck on a beach?

Seems like hauling it a few miles offshore would do the trick, but who knows it might wash back.

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.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_whale:

"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.

TFA says the current recommendation is to bury the whale.

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.

Cool. There is still a small article about this:

https://starcommunity.com.au/star/04-05-2008/time-and-tide-w...

> hauling it a few miles offshore

1. Where are you going to put the crane? It's a beach.

2. Where are you going to put the ship or tugboat? It's a beach.

I don't know the solution to beached whale disposal either. I just assume that it's really, really gross.

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.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Carissa

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.

There's a bit of a trick to pushing a 20t rotting chunk of soft flesh into straps wide enough to then not slice through the beast when under tow.

Not all whale carcasses float -- some sink like a stone (and some sink, only to later rise again).

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.

Got a feeling even a tensile steel wire won't be strong enough to cut through a whale bone before it either snaps or starts dragging the whale.

That's remastered? They didn't bother touching the audio at all. Too bad.

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.

And I recall a distinctive red in a large portion of the stuff blasted upward. Did they remove the blood in the remaster?

KATU's YouTube channel has the original-quality version also:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPuaSY0cMK8

The color balance is totally different. The remastered blast is not nearly so red, but then, neither is the entire rest of the video.

It's a 4K scan of the original film, a substantial improvement over the extremely 1970s broadcast quality video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPuaSY0cMK8

why was the quality so low? even back in 70s broadcasts had better quality than this

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.

I wonder if Twitter's fail whale was inspired by this event.

Starting around 42 seconds in, the video briefly sounds a little like Alice's Restaurant. Which album apparently was released only 3 years earlier.

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?

> I mean, the consequences should have been obvious to anyone.

Only on HN could some become an expert on how to blow up whales after watching one video.

1927 - STRANDED WHALE - DISPOSING OF THE CARCASS - DYNAMITE RESORTED TO https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/93580808

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.

According to the article:

"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 original call must have been an interesting conversation.

Credit must be due just for getting through switchboard to someone who could give a professional opinion.

> overestimated

Don't you mean underestimated?

>Apparently they vastly overestimated how much explosive to use,

I disagree. Had they over-estimated there would have simply been pink mist and a bad smell.

Blowing them up with dynamite was a common response in those days. Experts believe that they didn't use enough, and didn't place the charge properly.

My guess is that no one had a solution, so the problem fell through to the first person with an idea.

In the video, the engineer says that they expect the whale to be vaporized

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)

> hell of a lot of seagull.

I can assure you there are sufficient seagulls on the Oregon coast.

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.

I think the idea was that they'd blast it into tiny pieces that crabs and birds could easily dispose of. Obviously it didn't work out that way.

did they place the charge directly underneath rather than in such a way that it would blow the wreckage directionally out to sea?

The video contains an answer to that particular question!

tl;dr from the video itself: "the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds."

I'd forgotten the commentary by the reporter.

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