Thirty Days to Unlock FCAT Writing Success - Polk County School ...

Week Five, Day One: The Exploding Whale Lesson
Article A: Friday, November 13, 1970
By Larry Bacon
The sun was shining and there was a gentle breeze on the beach south of the Siuslaw River Thursday as
State Highway Division workers placed twenty 50-pound cases of explosives under the 45-foot whale
which washed up on the beach Monday.
Coast residents, as well as many from Eugene, walked over the sand dunes to the beach to see the
show. Cameras dangled from nearly everyone. The crowd included a sprinkling of television cameramen.
As workmen excavated the holes for the dynamite, shutterbugs took pictures of each other in front of
the beached whale — lying on its side displaying a gaping red and white expanse of flesh and bone
where someone had sawed away its lower jaw.
Everybody stayed upwind.
One woman onlooker suggested the highway division should wait until Monday to blow up the whale.
That way, she reasoned, the people who come to the beach for the weekend could have an opportunity
to see it.
For safety reasons, George Thornton, assistant district highway engineer, ordered everyone back as
demolition experts from his Eugene office placed the charges.
He said his plan was to place the explosives so the force of the blast would throw most of the pieces of
the whale toward the ocean. Then when the tide washed it back in, he said, highway crews would haul
away or bury what the seagulls didn’t eat.
It took an hour and 45 minutes to place the dynamite. As final preparations were made, a greenhelmeted
sheriff’s deputy moved the ranks of onlookers back.
The dunes a quarter mile south of the whale were dotted with spectators — most of them watching
through binnoculars [sic] or telescopic camera lenses.
Thornton gave the signal to push the plunger.
The beach erupted in a 100-foot high column of sand and whale. Chunks of the animal flew in every
direction and spectators began to scream and run for cover when they glimpsed the large pieces soaring
directly overhead.
No one was hit, but a piece about three feet long caved in the top of a late-model car in a South Jetty
Road parking lot.
Walter Umenhofer, a Springfield businessman, stood in the middle of a crowd around his damaged car
and ruefully watched a hard-hatted highway worker remove the piece of blubber with a shovel.
“My insurance company’s never going to believe this,” he said.
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