A 52-foot tanker carrying 102,000 Chinook salmon in Oregon went off the road and overturned late last month — but it happened in the best possible place.

The vehicle made a sharp turn on March 29 and eventually overturned on the banks of Lookingglass Creek in northeastern Oregon. The truck driver suffered only minor injuries and was “unharmed” after the accident, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife said in a news release Tuesday.

And about 77,000 of the young salmon, known as smolts, made it from the shore into the water and simply swam away.

“They went full steam into the water,” Andrew Gibbs, fish hatchery coordinator in Eastern Oregon, told the New York Times.

Not all fish were so lucky – 25,529 of them died either in the vehicle or on the bank without reaching the stream.

Gibbs described the truckload of smolts as “a kind of fish taxi,” part of a state program that transports young salmon from a hatchery to bolster populations in the state that have been negatively impacted by dams. These 18-month-old smolts were on their way to a pool on the state’s Imnaha River to begin their journey into the wild, according to the Times.

The fry that made it to the creek are expected to survive, Gibbs told the local Baker City Herald. Within 48 hours of the crash, some of them had already been found on the nearby lower Grande Ronde River. They will eventually head out to sea and are expected to return to Lookingglass Creek as adults to spawn.

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