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Historic Ideas That Aged Like Complete Garbage

Khalid Elhassan July 11, 2020 35 min

Madame Nhu - South Vietnam — Protests in Saigon. People's World

11. A Seemingly-Dynamite Idea That Was Not So Dynamite

A reporter covering the beached whale. KVAL

Without a frame of reference, Oregon’s Highway Division concluded that dragging the behemoth off and burying it was not a good idea, because decomposition gasses would destabilize the grave and uncover it. Cutting it up and then burying it would reduce that risk, but nobody was willing to chop up the stinking carcass.

So the authorities turned to dynamite: 20 cases, or half a ton of it. A military veteran with explosives training happened to be in the area, and he warned that 20 cases of dynamite was way too much. His advice that 20 sticks of dynamite would be enough was ignored by the authorities, who hoped that the blast would disintegrate the whale, with the resulting small pieces getting consumed by scavengers.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.