All,
Forgive me, I can't remember your name, but a regular poster on this site has as their signature tag, "No problem is insoluble by the proper application of explosives!"
Well, maybe the inhabitants of Florence, Lane County, Oregon will disagree.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_t44...eature=related

John

Ah, yes, the old exploding whale video. The fail there is that they didn't use enough high explosives.

Fred

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"For shame, gentlemen, pack your evidence a little better against another time."
-- John Dryden, "The Vindication of The Duke of Guise" 1684

I think they would have been better served if thay had applied a sufficient amount of flame. The wholesale redistribution of rotting whale by the application of high explosives is clearly a mistake in judgment, and a bigger
stinking mess.

Definitely not anywhere near enough explosives, plus if they had placed the charges correctly, then they could have blown most of the carcass into the water. But it could have been worse: http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzool...perm_whale.php

David.

dgavin

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Thank you, Sir!
Mr.gavin, would you 'dispose' of an unwanted whale with a big bang?
Surely the best and most skilled use of explosives would be to excavate a big hole, so placed that the whale just rolls in and all the elevated sand falls back onto it?
Job done!

John

They really should have towed that whale out to sea where great white sharks take Beeg chuncks out of it , and the little creatures of the sea do
the rest. But they decided to play cheap.

Looks like it's impacted by a bowl of petunias.

__________________
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" -- Charles Darwin
"Your right to hold an opinion is not being contested. Your expectation that it be taken seriously is." -- Jason Thompson
Meet the OOONG TOE.

Oh no! not again!

Exactly. Just think - if they could have used a small nuke, they'd have done away with the whale and had a new bay to boast about!

__________________
If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

They just didn't realize the correct number of explosives was "42"

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Gone Sailing

It's the only way to be sure.

Nick

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--
Nick Theodorakis

I wonder if anyone bothered to contact one of the local fishing industry reps. Certainly there had to be some old whalers lurking along the coast...

__________________
If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

Whaling is prohibited within a measured limit, I believe.

I, for one, am satisfied both with the arrived at solution to the problem, and the somehow unforeseen result of said solution.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
"In order to increase awareness of the homeless, security have been given binoculars."

What the OP fails to realize is the quote states proper or suitable use of high explosives.

This was neither, but could have been if somebody not suffering from cranial rectal inversion syndrome had been present.

Even a good idea, poorly executed, still sucks.

Around here they just bulldoze a hole in the sand and push the dead whale in.

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In your rush to call everyone "entrenched" or closed-minded or "limited" you fail to note that the "limit" here has a very natural boundary: that point at which the evidence stops. - JayUtah

Science fiction was never meant to be an educational tool. - Editor Amazing Tales

One proper application of high explosives would have been to use them to dig the hole for the whale.

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Brilliant Henrick,

but this is the state (Oregon) where they fired their highway planner for making freeway offramps that were banked in the wrong direction. Somehow real civil engineers didn't see that as excusable at all. Right about this time frame (1970's). These were his men at work. As my old construction foreman used to say, "You can't make chicken soup with chicken "excrement"."

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In your rush to call everyone "entrenched" or closed-minded or "limited" you fail to note that the "limit" here has a very natural boundary: that point at which the evidence stops. - JayUtah

Science fiction was never meant to be an educational tool. - Editor Amazing Tales

Did not anyone realise that lots of candles
might be useful shortly?

Apparently the amount of explosives needed to dispose a dead animal does not scale linearily with the mass of the carcass. According to this tech tip, 55 pounds of explosives should ensure total obliteration of a 1,100 pound horse. Going by that example and assuming linear relationship, half a ton of dynamite should have been enough for an eight-ton whale. It also might be that the highway engineers did not distribute the explosives around the whale properly, thus leaving a large chunk intact.

I thought that mass equations typically scaled exponentially rather than linearly?

__________________

I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
"In order to increase awareness of the homeless, security have been given binoculars."

They didn't want to blow it into lots of small bits (which was what they actually accomplished for part of it), they thought they could make the whale fly into the water.

Incidentally, you do know that applying 55 pounds of explosive to a dead horse doesn't make the horse disappear but rather makes it cover a lot of ground really fast with tiny bits of horse.

__________________
‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

For that.. shove a thick iron plate under it. A stack of nukes in the middle, and launch it Project Orion style. (Just have the grace to put a bowl of petunias with it on the plate, so it has company on the way down.)

__________________
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" -- Charles Darwin
"Your right to hold an opinion is not being contested. Your expectation that it be taken seriously is." -- Jason Thompson
Meet the OOONG TOE.

God, you just gotta love typos in explosive manuals.

Though the best one I ever saw was one teaching you how to make plastique at home that had you pouring water into about a half a gallon of sulfuric acid at a critical stage, where if you were following the directions to the letter, you would also have a bunch of other nasty stuff on the table already. I knew better than that and I had a chemist/blasting expert (With Vietnam experience) look at it and at first he laughed when he saw the paragragh in question, then he stopped laughing when he read the whole thing. Said it wasn't a typo so much as a boobytrap in print.

I suspect somebody was actually using Applied Darwinian Selection when that manual was printed.

__________________
In your rush to call everyone "entrenched" or closed-minded or "limited" you fail to note that the "limit" here has a very natural boundary: that point at which the evidence stops. - JayUtah

Science fiction was never meant to be an educational tool. - Editor Amazing Tales

Well, the reporter in the video explains:

The hope was that the long-dead Pacific gray whale would be almost disintegrated by the blast, and the small pieces still around after the explosion would be taken care of by seagulls and other scavengers.

and the engineer says:

The only thing is we’re not sure just exactly how much explosives it’ll take to disintegrate this thing, so the scavengers, seagulls, and crabs and whatnot can clean it up.

So I think that blowing it into lots of small bits was exactly what they were trying to do.

As for the part where the reporter notes:

The dynamite was buried primarily on the leeward side of the big mammal so as most of the remains would be blown toward to sea.

I believe they were trying to prevent any small pieces from flying inland where they might spread the smell closer to human habitation or where there might be less scavengers such as crabs to clean up the mess.

In the manual I linked they say:

Caracasses that have been dispersed will generally be totally gone after a few days.

Caracasses that have been partially obliterated will generally not show any trace of existence the next day.

I believe scavengers play an important role in making those tiny bits disappear after a few days.

Not for the removal of an already dead, beached whale, it isn't.

__________________
If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

LoL, isn't that the same state where pumping your own gas is prohibited due to "safety reasons?" And they blow whale shards over a quarter mile radius and hundreds of people.

Ok, I think I got it...

__________________
If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.