A man in Norway awoke early Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion.
For an as-yet unknown reason, the 443-foot NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway.
Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had repeatedly rung his doorbell to no avail gave up and called him on the phone.
“The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television channel TV2.
His neighbor, Jostein Jorgensen, said he was roused at around 5 a.m. local time by the sound of a ship heading at full speed toward land and immediately ran to Helberg’s house.
“I was sure that he was already outside, but no, there was no sign of life. I rang the doorbell many times and nothing … And it was only when I called him on the phone that I managed to contact him,” Jorgensen told TV2.
Several hours later, the massive red and green container ship was still stuck near the wooden house, waiting to be refloated.
“It’s a very bulky new neighbor but it will soon go away,” Helberg said.
The ship reportedly caused damage to a heating pipe in Helberg’s cabin, TV2 reported, but the homeowner told the station it could have been much worse.
“If the ship had hit the rocky cliff right next to it, it would have lifted up and hit the house hard,” he told TV2. “It wasn’t many meters off.”
None of the 16 crew members were injured in the incident, the cause of which is being investigated by Norwegian police.
Bente Hetland, the CEO of the shipping company that owns the NCL Salten, told TV2 that the same ship ran aground twice before — once in 2023 in Hadsel and once in 2024, in Ålesund.
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