George Thornton, the engineer in charge of the operation, told an interviewer that he was not sure how much dynamite would be needed, saying that he had been chosen to remove the whale because his supervisor had gone hunting.

[6][7] A military veteran with explosives training who happened to be in the area warned that the planned twenty cases of dynamite was far too much, and that 20 sticks (8.4 lb or 3.8 kg)[8] would have sufficed, but his advice went unheeded.

[3] The dynamite was detonated on November 12 at 3:45 p.m.[2] A cameraman, Doug Brazil, filmed it for a story by news reporter Paul Linnman of KATU-TV in Portland, Oregon.

In his report, Linnman also noted that scavenger birds, who it had been hoped would eat the remains of the carcass after the explosion, did not appear as they were possibly scared away by the noise.

The explosives-expert veteran's brand-new automobile, purchased during a "Get a Whale of a Deal" promotion in a nearby city, was damaged by a chunk of falling blubber.

When Linnman contacted him in the mid-1990s, the newsman said Thornton felt the operation had been an overall success and had been converted into a public-relations disaster by hostile media reports.

[13] The story was brought to widespread public attention by writer Dave Barry in his Miami Herald column of May 20, 1990, when he reported that he possessed footage of the event.

[14] As a result of these omissions, an article in the ODOT's TranScript notes that: "We started getting calls from curious reporters across the country right after the electronic bulletin board story appeared," said Ed Schoaps, public affairs coordinator for the Oregon Department of Transportation.

The Wall Street Journal called, and Washington, D.C.–based Governing magazine covered the immortal legend of the beached whale in its June issue.

[1] For the 50th anniversary of the event, KATU pulled the original 16 mm footage from the archives and released a remastered edition of the news report in 4K resolution.

Taiwan News reported that, while the whale was being moved, "a large crowd of more than 600 local Yunlin residents and curiosity seekers, along with vendors selling snack food and hot drinks, braved the cold temperature and chilly wind to watch workmen try to haul away the dead marine leviathan".

[21] Professor Wang Chien-ping had ordered the whale be moved to the Sutsao Wild Life Reservation Area after he had been refused permission to perform a necropsy at the National Cheng Kung University in Tainan.

When it burst, the whale carcass was on the back of a truck near the center of Tainan, en route from the university laboratory to the preserve.