Two weeks ago, 20,000 salmon escaped from a fish farming site at Sandsvág near the village of Sandur.
According to seafood giant Mowi, the owner of the fish farm from which the salmon escaped, the company managed to retrieve only 300 of the escaped salmon.
Mowi has six large holding pens at Sandsvág, each of them containing around 100,000 salmon. Harvesting is underway and will be over in two weeks, with smolt being placed back into the sea cages next spring.
Although 20,000 salmon escaping from a holding pen may sound alarming to some, Umhvørvisstovan, the Faroese Environmental Protection Agency, says there is no need to panic.
“We don’t have any wild salmon in the Faroe Islands who’d be affected by this,” the agency’s Suni Petersen told news magazine Bladid.fo. “I also doubt that many of these salmons will survive in the wild,” he added.
Mowi CEO Hans Jákup Mikkelsen, meanwhile, in an interview with public broadcaster Kringvarp Føroya said the salmon company immediately after the incident took action to make sure no similar event will reoccur.
