History

 

The Faroese have undoubtedly always known about SALT, ……

 

Svabo

When the fishing industry grew, so did the demand for salt. During the 1930’s the demand for salt was so great, that merchants had to find new ways to meet the need for this increased demand.

In the 1920’s and 30’s, Suðuroy was a progressive island indeed; just about half of the Faroese fleet belonged to Suðuroy. Even though only 12 – 15 % of the total population of the Faroe Islands lived on the island.

An estimate of 15-20.000 tons of salt was imported in 1930. From places like Sfax: Tunesia and Ibiza: Spain. This was backbreaking labour, because every kilo had to be manually shovelled into the carts.

 

 

Drelnes

One of the owners of the salt productions in Sfax, “Compagnie Commerciale des Sels Marins”, who was located in Paris, France, decided it was time to make some modern changes to the North Atlantic, and thus, the salt silos started to become a reality. One was to be built in the Faroe Islands, one in the south of Iceland and one more in Northern Norway.

The salt silo was designed by a French architect, but the name has yet to be discovered, we are still trying to hunt him down (so to speak).

Danish engineers “ C.G. Jensen” were in charge of the technical preparations and the economics and supplied the accountants for the construction of the silo. The silo had a capacity of 10.000 tonnes of salt and on the shipping floor they were able to shift 50 – 100 Tonnes/Hour.Construction started in 1937 and was complete a year later in 1938, the floor was over 1.000 m2, and was 25m tall, the conveyor belts were about 110m long. So this was by far, the largest industrial planning in the country.

On the 8th of February 1939, the 1st ship to make use of the silo was the “Slupp” (Sloop, a single-masted sailboat with only one headsail) “Godthaab”, owned by N.J. Mortensen, Tvøroyri. It took them only one hour to supply the ship with salt, which would otherwise have taken them about two working days to complete, so, this was a great engineering accomplishment.

 

World War II.

On a beautiful day on the 9th of October, 1941, a German airplane came flying low and slowly along the fjord, and people (witnesses are still alive today to confirm this story) could see the crew of the bomber.

9 men were working at the salt silo this day, and they didn’t like the look of these uninvited German guests, so the evacuated the building.
at pm 3:15, all hell broke loose, they had bombed a big pile of coal just west of the silo. And at the same time there was another explosion! The silo was hit directly in the center of the floor. So the whole roof was blown clean off and there was a huge column of salt reaching the sky.

The bomber crew were not satisfied quite yet! The opened machine gun fire on two boys who were playing near the pile of coal who had managed to find cover in a ditch during the bombing. They got away scot free, but were deafened for several days.

 

And just like that, all was quiet and the silo looked like a giant whale carcass, but the men who worked there wanted to salvage the arches and fastened wires. But there was a powerful storm on the 7th of February 1944 and the silo had to succumb to the elements and all the arches broke of and collapsed, all except the 3 Northernmost arches. (but one of them was severely damaged, so had to be taken down, but the other 2 are still up to this day)

 

 

 

The silo was used for salt up until early 1980’s.