Florence has a new park and it’s named after one of Oregon’s greatest triumphs -- welcome to Exploding Whale Memorial Park.
Nov. 12, 1970 is an auspicious day in Oregon history. It is the day Tonya Harding was born in Portland and the day, on the Oregon coast, engineers decided to use dynamite to remove a massive sperm whale carcass from the beach.
Oregon, of course, would never be the same.
Harding would go on to be one of the greatest ice skaters in history, and the pieces of blubber that fell from the sky that day -- not neatly disintegrating but instead raining down in massive chunks on bystanders and vehicles -- would live on in generations of Oregonians’ minds, a memory of the best botched whale removal Oregon had ever seen.
Florence, near where the whale -- or as a KATU reporter referred to it at the time “a stinking whale of a problem” -- washed up, is finally honoring this beautiful moment in history with a new park.
It was the people of Florence who picked the name Exploding Whale Memorial Park.
“We asked the community for name suggestions, narrowed those 120-plus names down to nine, and had the community vote on them,” said Florence city project manager Megan Messmer.
The park offers views of the Siuslaw River and Bridge and the sand dunes on the south side of the river, according to the City of Florence’s website.
There are picnic tables and a shelter and a multi-use path, but, sadly, no whale carcasses, exploded or otherwise.
-- Lizzy Acker
503-221-8052, lacker@oregonian.com, @lizzzyacker