A truck carrying 102,000 Chinook salmon crashed and dumped about 77,000 of the fish into the wrong Oregon river, but isn’t expected to cause any harm to the fish or river ecosystem.
“I'm no expert on salmon and these streams in Oregon, but it sounds like the biologists there aren't too concerned. A few more adult salmon will return to one stream, the other will have a few less,” retired Wyoming Game and Fish Department fish biologist Bill Wichers told Cowboy State Daily.
The closest thing Wyoming wildlife officials can recall happening in the Cowboy State was the time when a load of fish to be stocked in a mountain lake was accidentally dropped from a helicopter into a stand of trees.
But with the salmon, those making it to the river should be OK and aren’t expected to put any undo pressure on its ecosystem.
“I doubt there will be any noticeable ecological issues as these fish are of a size where they'll be running to the ocean very soon,” he added.
“It looks like they're not too concerned about that specific river that those salmon were ‘stocked,’” John McCoy, a Game and Fish aquatic habitat biologist for the Casper region told Cowboy State Daily. “So long as there are no passage barriers, those fish will probably come back to that creek to try to spawn as adults after a few years.”
The place where the fish were accidentally dumped, along Lookingglass Creek — a tributary of the Grande Ronde River —connects back to the ocean, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) spokeswoman Michelle Dennehy told Cowboy State Daily.
Wreck, Fish Spill
The truck full of salmon smolts (young fish) was bound from the Lookingglass Hatchery in northeast Oregon to a release site in the Imnaha River on March 29, according to ODFW.
However, the driver lost control on a sharp corner, and the 53-foot semitrailer rolled over onto the passenger side, skidded on the pavement and went over a rocky embankment and came to rest on its roof.
The driver, an ODFW employee, suffered only minor injuries.
After the crash, close to 80,000 of the smolts spilled out and made it into the creek, but the rest died in the remains of the tanker or along the streambank, according to ODFW.
No Major Disruption
The salmon should adapt to their new environment, eventually make their way to the ocean and return in a few years to spawn, Dennehy said.
“We expect to see 500-900 fewer adult fish in 2027. It will be a blip for the next one or two years,” she said. “It’s unfortunate, but from a conservation standpoint, it’s not going to have long-term impact.”
McCoy, who previously worked with salmon in the Northwest, agreed that in the long run, the fish that survived the crash will just do what salmon have always done.
“Most of those rivers have salmon and steelhead swimming up and down those drainages to spawn anyway,” he said. “Those fish will probably return to that particular drainage (the site of the crash) to spawn.”
No Similar Story In Wyoming
McCoy said transporting fish always comes with some degree of risk, but he hadn’t heard of any such major mishap happening in Wyoming.
Wichers said the only similar incident he recalled during his long career with Game and Fish involved a helicopter and trout raining down on timber.
“I'm not aware of anything like this (truck crash) happening in Wyoming, although I heard that one of our biologists, now deceased, accidentally bumped a switch while stocking trout into high mountain lakes via helicopter, and that dropped a small tank full of fish into the trees instead of the target lake,” he said.
Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.
