- [Narrator] An eight-ton, 45-foot sperm whale carcass
washes up on your beach.
What do you do? You can't move it.
- [Paul] The thing is falling apart.
- [Narrator] You can't bury it.
- [Paul] There's water under the sand.
- [Narrator] You can't throw it back in the ocean.
- [Paul] Of course, the tides can push them back in.
- [Narrator] Might as well blow it up?
It was an ordinary day in November, 1970.
- [Paul] November 12, 1970, to be exact.
- [Narrator] Thanks, Paul.
This here is Paul Linnman.
He was a television reporter for Portland's KATU,
and on November 12, 1970,
Paul was assigned a story
that would change his life forever.
- What to do with one 45-foot, eight-ton whale,
dead on arrival on a beach near Florence.
Whales washing up on the beach in Oregon
are not an uncommon occurrence.
- [Narrator] But it had been so long,
state officials didn't know how to get rid of
that giant, stinking carcass.
- [Paul] That's precisely why
the Oregon Department of Transportation
decided to use dynamite.
- [Narrator] The plan was to blow the whale
into smaller pieces,
and have scavengers like seagulls eat the rest of it.
Paul and his cameraman set up their shot
and waited a thousand yards away from the blast.
- [Paul] Within, I'd say, about 20 or 30 seconds,
it was soon raining down on all of us.
And larger pieces that came down,
it became louder and louder
until you realized, wow, if one of these chunks hits me,
I'm a goner.
We start running in the direction of the parking lot,
and that's when a piece of blubber
about the size of a small coffee table
completely flattened an Oldsmobile.
- [Narrator] KATU's exploding whale report
was a viral video in the pre-internet age.
It's inspired parodies and one-man shows,
and for Paul Linnman, it's been career-defining.
- [Paul] It's something that reoccurs in my life
in one way or another every single day.
I know what's gonna be written about in my obituary.