They’ve been blown up and cut to pieces, buried on beaches and dumped miles out at sea — but there’s still no foolproof way to get rid of a dead whale.
Witness Wally.
For the past two weeks, Los Angeles and Orange County officials have towed the 45-foot-long dead humpback out to sea — again and again and again.
But the female whale with the inappropriate name has refused her watery grave.
Since she initially washed up on Dockweiler State Beach near Los Angeles International Airport on July 1, Wally has bobbed farther and farther south, coming close to the shore off San Pedro, then Newport Beach, and later Dana Point, before most recently being towed away from San Clemente. Each time, lifeguards tugged Wally back out to sea in the hope that she would decompose naturally away from the beach.
‘Crazy situation’
“This is kind of a crazy situation in that it keeps coming back,” said Justin Greenman, assistant stranding coordinator for California with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Ideally, NOAA prefers to let a whale decompose on the beach, he said, but that wasn’t an option with Wally, who washed up days before the Fourth of July and about 100 yards from an RV park.
Since then, a convergence of problems have made Wally particularly difficult to dispose of, including that she had never been towed out far enough to keep winds and currents from drawing her bloated body back to the shore, Greenman said.
Before Wally was dragged out the first time, NOAA put together a float model, taking into account currents and winds to determine how far offshore the whale needed to be deposited to keep her from making a second shoreline appearance, Greenman said.
According to the NOAA model, Wally should have been towed about 30 miles offshore, he said.
Not enough fuel
Instead, she was tugged roughly 15 miles off the beach at Dockweiler, said county lifeguard Capt. Kenichi Haskett. It came down to the simple fact that none of the county lifeguard vessels were large enough to tow the whale the full 30 miles and retain enough fuel to make the return journey, Haskett said.
Not surprisingly, the challenge of disposing of a dead cetacean is its size. That was the problem for the Los Angeles County lifeguards who towed the 35- to 40-ton whale from her initial landing spot at Dockweiler after they waited for high tide to pull her back in the ocean, he said.
“It was something that was extremely strenuous to remove,” Haskett said.
Even the roughly 15-mile trip took the lifeguard vessel nearly five hours, he said. L.A. County lifeguards are prepared for their day-to-day work assisting vessels and making rescues, he said, but towing a whale isn’t something the agency is prepared for, he said.
Whale like a sail
Unfortunately, scientists did not have time to perform a full necropsy of Wally. When she was pulled off the beach, the whale was still largely intact, which allowed gases to build up inside Wally and keep her floating for longer than if researchers had been able to make more cuts, Greenman said.
“Generally, when given the chance to do a full necropsy — when I get a chance to fully open (a whale) up and everything — it does not float as long,” he said.
Without an initial necropsy, the gases that built up inside Wally turned the whale into a sail, Greenman said, making it even easier for the animal’s corpse to be pushed by winds and currents back toward the shore.
“Obviously, it works better when the animal can be opened up and degassed,” he said.
Greenman added that it’s still not clear what killed Wally, but researchers have taken samples and are testing for biotoxins. Those test results should come back in about a month, he said.
Recurring problem
Generally, disposing of dead whales has posed a challenge wherever they have landed. In one instance in 1970, an Oregon town attempted to blast away a dead whale with dynamite, nearly destroying an Oldsmobile as chunks of the mammal rained down onto onlookers.
Haskett said a pyrotechnic solution was suggested to get rid of Wally’s carcass, but lifeguards chose to tow her out instead.
More recently, a dead, 40,000-pound Fin whale washed up on a Malibu beach in 2012, leading to an interagency kerfuffle as state, county and local officials tried to foist onto each other the responsibility for removing the malodorous carcass from the affluent coastal area. Eventually the corpse was towed away from the beach several days after it washed ashore.
Earlier this year, when a gray whale washed up near the popular Trestles surfing spot at San Onofre State Beach, officials opted to cut up and haul the whale away on trucks after ruling out towing it to sea or burying it.
Dead whales are fairly common, Greenman said. In the past week, he’s heard of two whale carcasses floating near the Channel Islands. What isn’t common is having one corpse floating back to shore again and again and again and again, he said.
