Tuesday February 10, 2004 at  5:46 PM

A Whale of an Explosion

Appearing in  What Not

Tainan, the fourth largest city in Taiwan, is home to some 700,000 people. Not normally noticed by the international press, Tainan recently appeared in headlines around the world thanks to Professor Wang Chien-ping, of the National Cheng Kung University.

Professor Wang is a marine biologist who in mid-January found himself in the rather unexpected possession of a deceased sperm whale. Hoping to collect the animal’s remains for various educational purposes, Professor Wang had the specimen loaded on a trailer truck so it could be taken to the Shi-Tsao Natural Preserve.

Although it’s hard enough to imagine the sight of a whale carcass on a trailer truck, much less the smell, it’s what happened next that’s most memorable. In the Professor’s own words, “Because of the natural decomposing process, a lot of gases accumulated, and when the pressure build-up was too great, the whale’s belly exploded.”

Although the photos don’t quite do the scene justice, the words of Jason Pan of the Taiwan News provide a sense of the scene, “Besides the shocking red bloody mess, large piles of whale intestines and guts were strewn along the road, leaving an unpleasant and ghastly scene for startled residents.”

While the kind citizens of Tainan might fault Professor Wang for his failure to account for the whale’s decaying situation, such an oversight pales in comparison to the pre-meditated actions of one George Thornton.

In 1970 Thorton was a highway engineer in Lane County, Oregon, when an 8 ton Pacific grey whale washed up on a local beach. Deciding that the body was too large to be buried and too malodorous to disect, Thorton and his fellow engineers decided the best way to dispose of the 8 ton carcass was to blow it up with dynamite — half a ton of dynamite.

According to contemporary reports, any comedic ambiance associated with the project abruptly ended with the detonation of the dynamite. In the words of Paul Linnman, a reporter at the scene, “Our cameras stopped rolling immediately after the blast. The humor of the entire situation suddenly gave way to a run for survival as huge chunks of whale blubber fell everywhere…The dunes were rapidly evacuated as spectators escaped both the falling debris and the overwhelming smell.”

I’m not sure what exploding whales have to do with anything, but it seemed one of those unusual stories worthy of the retelling.

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