Boys and Girls, let's celebrate not well known explosives-is-the-answer-to-all-problems event that happened 55 years and one month ago, named The Exploding Whale.One dead whale, one platoon of bored army engineers.. What could go wrong?https://davebarry.substack.com/p/the-exploding-whalehttps://youtu.be/V6CLumsir34
>>64619451Retarded ditch digger here with 0 expereince with explosives, why not make a sand bulwark with grunt and civilian labor, and point the explosion and whale chunks out to sea? Sure, every shark within 100 nautical miles will immediately B line to your beach, but I highly doubt anyone wants to swim in mid November waters.
>>64619496You answered yourself - grunt work. And these guys obviously wanted to go smart way, not the hard way.
Technically one should calculate the explosives cost versus cleanup man hours labor cost and be able to find that point on a two graph line.
>>64619771Counterpoint, blowing up a dead whale is metal as fuck and the kind of thing you only get one chance to do in a lifetime.
>>64619771I imagine whichever geniuses came up with the idea justified it with all sorts of cost-benefit BS while secretly keeping the thought hidden in the back of their mind that their real motivation for it would be that it's funny.>George Thornton, the engineer in charge of the operation, told an interviewer that he was not sure how much dynamite would be needed, saying that he had been chosen to remove the whale because his supervisor had gone hunting. A charge of one-half short ton (450 kg) of dynamite was selected.[7][8] 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)[9] would have sufficed, but his advice went unheeded.>Later that day, Thornton told the Eugene Register-Guard, "It went just exactly right. [...] Except the blast funneled a hole in the sand under the whale" and that some of the whale chunks were subsequently blown back toward the onlookers and their cars.>Thornton was promoted to the Medford office several months after the incident, and served in that post until his retirement. When Linnman contacted him in the mid-1990s, the newsman said Thornton felt the operation had been an overall success and had been converted into a public-relations disaster by hostile media reports.Some other amusing highlights are pic related, they named a park after the event, and this little anecdote:>Days before the blast, a local explosive expert had purchased a new automobile in a "Get a Whale of a Deal" promotion. It was damaged by a chunk of falling blubber.
>>64619451>these retards unironically thought stuffing half-a-ton of high explosives next to a dead whale was preferable to just cutting it up and towing the remains out to sea to be devoured by sharks>>64619496>Sure, every shark within 100 nautical miles will immediately B line to your beachThe sound generated by explosives would actually scare them away. There's a reason why basically every account of shipwreck survivors being killed by sharks has the attacks starting only hours after the ship has already gone down.>>64620894>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)[9] would have sufficed, but his advice went unheeded.bruh
>>64622174>these retards unironically thoughtI'm absolutely sure, they did this for the lulz. How after you have a chance to pull such idea through?I'm also sure, they knew amount of explosives are overkill, but boys will be boys, right.
>>64622174>every account of shipwreck survivors being killed by sharks has the attacks starting only hours after the ship has already gone downI've watched a lot of Blue Planet; it's because sharks sort of spread out and stake out patches of ocean, and only school up together when they smell a large concentration of prey, which they can do from miles away. then they come from miles around.
>>64620894>Days before the blast, a local explosive expert had purchased a new automobile in a "Get a Whale of a Deal" promotion. It was damaged by a chunk of falling blubber.
