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Comment by lando2319 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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