SEDGWICK – A truck driver, police officers and state highway employees faced a fine kettle of fish Tuesday morning on Route 15 – how to clean up an estimated 20,000 pounds of herring from the road.

The fish – used for lobster bait – ended up in the highway after a tractor-trailer flipped onto its side while driving north up Caterpillar Hill around 7:30 a.m., according to Deputy Luke Gross of the Hancock County Sheriff’s Department.

After a car passed the truck on the left, the driver, Mark Schoppe, 34, of Cherryfield became distracted trying to look in his rearview mirrors, Gross said Wednesday.

Schoppe apparently was concerned about other trucks loaded with fish that were travelling up the hill behind him. Schoppe’s truck then drifted off the right side of the road into a soft shoulder, hit a ditch and flipped onto the driver’s side, the deputy said.

The driver was uninjured in the accident, according to Gross.

The truck and its load weighed 39,000 pounds, and the officer estimated the weight of the fish to be half that amount.

Work crews with the Maine Department of Transportation were called to the accident scene with a front-end loader to clean up the slippery cargo, Gross said.

It took about two hours to have the mess cleaned up, he said, but the fish could not be salvaged.

“They hauled it off for disposal,” Gross said.

The road was sanded after the fish was cleaned up to make sure the road surface was not too slick from the spill, the deputy said.