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A stranded whale in Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, also decayed until it exploded. Locals reported that its blubber "hung in the trees for weeks."
Whale corpses are regularly disposed of using explosives; however, the whales are usually first towed out to sea. Government-sanctioned explosions have occurred in South Africa, Iceland, and Australia.
A number of controlled explosions have been made in South Africa. Explosives were used to kill a beached humpback whale 25 miles (40 km) west of Port Elizabeth on August 6, 2001, while a Southern Right Whale that beached near Cape Town on September 15, 2005 was killed by authorities through detonation. In the latter instance, the authorities stated that the whale could not have been saved, and that the use of explosives in such cases was recommended by the International Whaling Commission. A few weeks after the Port Elizabeth explosion, the carcass of a second humpback was dragged out to sea and explosives were used to break it into pieces so it would not pose a hazard to shipping. Yet another explosion was performed in Bonza Bay on September 20, 2004, when an adult humpback whale died after beaching itself. In order to sink the whale, authorities towed it out to sea, affixed explosives to it, and set them off from a distance.
A whale carcass adrift in the Icelandic harbour of Hafnarfjörður was split in two by a controlled explosion on June 5, 2005. The remains were dragged out to sea; however, they soon drifted back, and eventually had to be tied down.
On September 2, 2010, a 31.2-foot (9.5 m) humpback whale that had been stranded for two weeks near the Western Australian city of Albany was killed by the Department of Environment and Conservation using explosives. The department had planned to let the whale die of natural causes, but decided to kill the animal with explosives after it repositioned itself on a sandbar.
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