The cases of the stinky fish somehow came off a truck in the middle of the road at around 2pm on Wednesday, and when a car subsequently drove over them, the contents were unleashed.
The entire road has been closed off at the location as a result, as emergency services work to clean up between 100-200 barrels of the foodstuff. No injuries (other than to the senses) have been reported.
Sweden's Transport Administration (Trafikverket) has the tricky task of trying to clean the fish off the road and get it open again, though it's not entirely certain how long it will take, given a lack of previous incidents of spilled herring to draw experience from.
“To start with the Transport Administration will send out a cleaning truck. If that's not sufficient, we'll have to rinse the road clean with water. If I'm being honest, I'm not really sure about the best way to clean herring, but we'll make sure the road is safe for traffic. Right now it's very slippy,” Jonas Gustafsson from the Norra Älvsborg emergency services told local newspaper Göteborgs Posten. He compared the effect to that of black ice.
Trucks accidentally unloading their unusual contents (and in particular, foodstuffs) is a bizarrely common occurrence in Sweden.
In November for example, a truck carrying 20 tonnes of Swedish meatballs toppled over near Skara in the centre of the country. Following the current trend, a truck full of gravad lax is presumably next in order to complete the hat-trick of Swedish culinary classics.
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