A real classic! What wasn’t featured in the original news story was a passerby who had demolitions experience in the army in Vietnam. He approached the guy in charge of the job and explained that this would never work because when you detonate explosives in sand like they were going to, instead of blowing the whale entirely out to sea laterally, the blast created a cone of explosive force straight upward which sheared off massive chucks of whale hundreds of feet into the air and left half the carcass basically untouched. That crushed car at the end? It belonged to the dude who warned it would go tits up! Here’s a 25 year anniversary retrospective with a little more info.

I don’t understand why they didn’t come at high tide and tow it miles out to sea using a couple tugboats. No dismemberment necessary, just a big strap around the tail-fin. Once miles from shore, the whale could be lanced to release the decomposition gasses and allow it to sink naturally where it could benefit the sea floor for decades. If they’d gone maybe 50ish miles offshore, that would have been proper deep sea abyssal zone and perfect for a whalefall.