a nasty accident.

By impactEDnurse • Nov 15th, 2009 • Category: ectopics

Not being too keen on trauma porn1, and being an avid scooter commuter, I was a little distressed to be sent what might be the most intestinally expunging scooter accident in history.
Was this some sort of mass casualty head on high speed collision? Did some poor scooter rider hit a giant kangaroo?
Turns out the actual story is a little more bizarre:

A 56-foot, 60-ton sperm whale died on a beach in Taiwan in January, 2004. Researchers wanted the carcass to perform an autopsy and for research, so they loaded the whale onto a tractor-trailer and set out through the city of Tainan, heading for the Shi-Tsau Natural Preserve.
It took 13 hours, three cranes and 50 workers to get the whale loaded on the truck. Unfortunately, on the way through the city, gasses built up to a critical level in the whale and it exploded, spewing whale guts in the street, on the cars and over pedestrians.
According to witnesses, the smell was pretty bad. Residents and shop owners put on masks and tried to clean up the mess. Eventually the whale continued its journey to the research center.
:: TruckSpills.com ::

Just great, as if I didn’t have enough things to be watching out for when on the Vespa, now I have to add exploding whales to the list.

  1. trauma porn: medical staff trying to out-gross their colleges by showing their most gruesome collection of trauma slides during a presentation. [↩]

impactEDnurse is also known as Ian Miller, a nurse with over 26 years experience working in a busy emergency department in, Australia. This site in no way reflects the opinions of that hospital. All stories (although based on actual experiences) have been changed to protect patient confidentiality.
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4 Responses »

  1. helva on November 17th, 2009 at 6:58 pm:

    LOL! You are brilliant, Ian :-)

  2. Beach Bum on December 17th, 2009 at 4:11 am:

    the classic exploding whale: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3712178515303087869#

  3. prn penguin on June 10th, 2010 at 9:03 pm:

    The Whale. It broke!

  4. Matthew Gatheringwater on June 11th, 2010 at 2:01 am:

    Beach Bum: I loved the video of the exploding whale. I was struck by how different this newscast was from anything I’ve seen in the post-cable news era. In the clip from 1970, the reporter created a story that heightend the drama of the report and made it even funnier. If CNN got this clip, we’d just see the moment of explosion over and over.

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