A dead whale washed up in Huntington Beach on Monday, June 3, and after it kept coming ashore a crew buried it in the sand. (Courtesy of Greg Crow/Huntington Beach Marine Safety Department)

A dead whale washed up in Huntington Beach on Monday, June 3, and after it kept coming ashore a crew buried it in the sand. (Courtesy of Greg Crow/Huntington Beach Marine Safety Department)

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A dead whale washed up in Huntington Beach on Monday, June 3, and after it kept coming ashore a crew buried it in the sand. (Courtesy of Greg Crow/Huntington Beach Marine Safety Department)



Planning on laying a towel down and sunbathing in Huntington Beach? You may be relaxing on top of a dead, decomposing whale.

A city maintenance crew buried a dead whale carcass, thought to be 20 to 30 feet long, that washed ashore Monday, June 3 near Beach Boulevard, after lifeguards tried to tow it out to sea but it made its way back to land.

Lifeguards began tracking the whale after they were alerted to it being near the offshore oil islands on Sunday. The whale came to shore at about 4 a.m. Monday, said Huntington Beach Marine Safety Lt. Greg Crow.

The water washed the whale back out, but it washed up again near tower 5. Lifeguards were able to get a line around its tail and tow it back out, but it came back to shore once again, this time near Beach Boulevard.

That’s where workers buried the carcass — in a hole about 15 feet deep, Crow said, with six to eight feet of sand placed on top of it.

Crow said in his years working in Huntington Beach, he can only remember a handful of whales being buried.

“It’s pretty high and dry, in the middle of the beach,” Crow said.

The whale isn’t a gray whale, a species that has been stranding in large numbers off the West Coast. Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared an “Unusual Mortality Event” as a step toward determining what’s happening to the species.

Most likely, this whale is a juvenile fin whale, according to Justin Viezbicke, NOAA’s California Stranding Coordinator.

Viezbicke said he thinks it’s the same whale that washed ashore near Anaheim Bay on Saturday, before being towed to deeper waters by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

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At that time, researchers were able to get a skin sample which they’ll use to find out more about the creature. But Viezbicke said it would have been helpful to get a closer look at the whale before it was buried Monday.

“Unfortunately, it was kind of a missed opportunity,” he said. “Hopefully we can work together in the future. These are really cool opportunities and pieces of the puzzle to tell us what’s going on out there.”

There generally are three methods of disposing of dead whale carcasses. Cutting them up and hauling them off to a landfill is expensive and takes a lot of work. Typically, lifeguard agencies try to tow the whales back to the ocean, but that also has its challenges, Viezbicke said.

“If you don’t take it far enough, it comes up in someone else’s area,” he said, noting that it can attract predators floating out at sea. “When they bloat, the wind can push them back to shore.”

If NOAA or other researchers can get to the whale while out at sea, they can do a necropsy — an animal autopsy — which helps cut open the blubber and deflate the whale, enabling it to sink.

The third way to dispose of whale carcasses is burials in the sand — often the easiest and cheapest method, he said.

“Whales coming ashore is very much a part of coastal California,” Viezbicke said. “Having these species that we have along the corridor of the coast, it brings the whales close to shore, but then we see whales die. It may be inconvenient for humans, but they are part of the coastal ecology.

“There’s a lot of opportunity for scavengers and other animals to feed off those carcasses,” he said. “It’s a challenge we have to balance.”