A semi-truck carrying more than 100,000 living salmon crashed in northeast Oregon. Incredibly, the truck overturned into a roadside creek and the vast majority of the young fish were dumped right into the water. The driver suffered minor injuries and the fish—spring Chinook smolts—are expected to survive.
"The accident occurred on a sharp corner with the 53-foot truck rolling onto the passenger side, skidding on its side on the pavement, and then going over a rocky embankment causing it to roll onto its roof," according to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.
From CNN:
The salmon were meant to be released in the Imnaha River, a 77-mile long watercourse in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest. The smolts lost constitute about 20 percent of the total salmon that will be released in the river this year, says the news release[…]
Salmon are raised at Lookingglass hatchery, then transported back and released to Imnaha to help combat threats to their population, according to Seth White, a professor in the department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences at Oregon State University and director of the Oregon hatchery Research Center. "The Imnaha River spring Chinook Salmon population depends on hatcheries to sustain their numbers," he told CNN in an email.
