A dying problem

Rico says Del Mar is just down the road from his father's house in La Jolla, but he hadn't heard about this one yet. Writing as The Ethicist, Randy Cohen has a column in The New York Times:

I am a former lifeguard chief for San Diego. Because I have dealt with dead-whale removals, lifeguards in Del Mar asked my advice about a dead gray whale that had floated ashore. It originally beached at Del Mar. City lifeguards towed it some five miles offshore, where it didn’t sink but floated south to a state beach in San Diego. State personnel trucked it to a landfill. Who should cover those costs? I concluded that Del Mar caused the problem and should help defray the state’s expenses. Ethically correct? Chris Brewster, San Diego

I can tell you what I do with my dead whales. No, wait, I’m thinking of something that happened at our last family reunion. And he wasn’t dead; he’d just had a little too much to drink. And he wasn’t a cetacean; not of any kind.
I’d say that you are a surfside Solomon. The beach in San Diego was coping with a situation created by Del Mar. It is tough to know whether Del Mar merely blundered by failing to anticipate the folly of dragging a whale carcass out to sea or whether it deliberately sought to pass along its dead-whale problem to the next town south, but either way it must clean up the mess it made for San Diego.
It is also difficult to know— and I say this with utmost respect for your profession and experience— why anybody sought legal advice from a lifeguard. If I were drowning, I wouldn’t call a lawyer. On the other hand, if I were to drown a lawyer— in some crazy dream; clearly nobody should actually drown anyone— I might ask a lifeguard’s advice.
After a “typically bureaucratic discussion,” Brewster reports, “cooler heads prevailed” in Del Mar, and they heeded his counsel. An official there emailed him to say that they agreed to share the state’s costs, “paying $750 of the disposal fee,” and that they suspected but could not prove “that the whale started out in Huntington Beach”— some sixty miles to the north of Del Mar— “and they towed it out to sea just as we did.” My limited knowledge of tides, currents, and Canadians notwithstanding, I suspect, but cannot prove, that the whale began its undignified funeral procession beached in Vancouver.