A WHALE OF A PROBLEM

My father sent me this. I don't know why.

Basically, there was a dead whale on the beach and nobody knew what to do about it, but it was rotting and started to stink. The whale was too big to push back into the ocean, nobody was willing to cut it up to bury it, and it couldn't be burned (on this last part, I don't know why; the whale certainly would have burned with a little gasoline, but maybe the townspeople didn't want a giant grease fire on the beach). So they hired an engineer, who placed a whole lot of dynamite (20 crates, in fact) on the leeward side of the whale. It was supposed to blow the whale towards the ocean, and break it up into tiny pieces that crabs and birds would eat. Instead, it sprayed large chunks of decaying whale all over the surrounding area, including on passers-by and their vehicles. The next few days were spent repairing damage and using machinery to bury huge pieces of whale. After the fact, everyone sort of shook their collective heads and said, "Wait, we tried to blow up a whale? That was stupid." But the fact is, it wasn't that stupid. The problem wasn't the method - I defy you to find a better solution to dispose of a rotting whale. The real problem? They used too much dynamite.

Dynamite is a high explosive, meaning that the shock wave of the detonating material moves faster than the speed of sound...meaning that it blows stuff up really fast and really hard. The engineer in question decided that the whale should be treated as a "large boulder". Unfortunately, the force a boulder can absorb before cracking is a whole lot more than the force a decomposing whale body can withstand. The blood-red mist appearing high over the blast site is already an indication of a serious miscalculation. Small wonder that, instead of a controlled detonation, bits of whale ended up showering the area in a quarter-mile radius.

The plan was good; the execution was lacking. According to a quick Google search of "How much crap can I blow up with a case of dynamite?" (cue CSIS knocking at my door in 3, 2, 1...) a few sticks, not crates, nestled under the whale would have done the trick without the whale shower.

Also, how is this the first time anyone has dealt with a dead whale?! Whales beach themselves frequently, to my understanding, and not all of them are pushed back to the water in time. Surely, even in 1970, somebody must have already developed a method for handling whale carcasses. Or at least an estimate of how much dynamite it would really take to blow one up.