Oregon highway workers had to find a way to dispose of the rotting carcass of a 45-foot-long, eight ton whale in Florence, the closest beach town to Eugene, on Nov. 12, 1970. They decided to obliterate it using 20 cases — half a ton — of dynamite. "The hope was that the long-dead Pacific gray whale would be almost disintegrated by the blast, and that any small pieces still around after the explosion would be taken care of by seagulls and other scavengers," explained KATU's Paul Linnman, in what New York Times reporter Mike Baker calls "surely one of the greatest local TV news segments of the century." And not because things went as planned. Watch below. Peter Weber
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