Now the inhabitants of New York are used to seeing (and smelling) some strange things in a city that never sleeps, and that has a lot of street life and crime .... and garbage strikes ....
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| New York Garbage Strikes Are Common |
.... after all, the The Five Families didn't always clean up after a hit.
But following a storm surge along the East coast in December 2022, a lot of items were washed up on to Rockaway Beach Boulevard and Beach 116th Street, in Queens, New York, which is not that uncommon with climate change increasing the chances of a storm.
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| Rockaway Beach Boulevard |
However what took the residents by surprise was the pungent smell and then the sight of large chunks of dead sperm whale meat .... which was believed to have come from a 25 to 30 feet long whale carcass that had washed up a few miles down the coast, a few days earlier. It was thought that the storm had broken the rotting corpse up and then swept the rotting parts in to the streets.
One of the locals commented "Wow, that is something to see (and smell), right there in the business district of Rock Park!"
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| Whale Removal Is A Big Job |
However, its not uncommon for dead whales to wash up in or near New York's shoreline. A cursory search uncovered numerous dead whale reports. In 2023 alone:
- An adult 35-foot long male humpback whale washed up on Lido Beach Sunday the night of the 29th of January 2023 and was found dead by emergency service workers on Monday the 31st.
- A dead humpback whale was seen floating about 4 or 5 miles off the New York-New Jersey coastline on Monday the 27th of February 2023.
- In June 2023 not one but two humpback whales were found dead off Wainscott, New York, and in Raritan Bay, New Jersey, according to local officials. The both appeared to have blunt force trauma suggestion a collision with a vessel of some kind.
- On August the 25th 2023 another dead humpback whale was washed up at Beach 13th Street in the Bayswater section of Far Rockaway .... this was during the fifth annual Queens Carnival in Far Rockaway.
While there have also been incidents in the past:
- A humpback whale carcass was spotted floating in the waters off of Great Kills Park Staten Island New York on Friday, September the 17th, 2021. it was buried on-site in the sand. This is a common if sometimes controversial (fears of it attracting sharks have been debunked but are a common belief) practise. The key in choosing a burial site is to ensure minimal levels of groundwater movement to stop decomposition plumes getting in to the ocean.
- In 2014 a 58-foot whale carcass washed up in Long Island.
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