A Norwegian man woke up on Thursday to find a 135-metre container ship grounded in his backyard, which is at a short distance from a fjord. Johan Helberg slept through the chaos until neighbours alerted him.
After entering the Trondheim Fjord on Thursday, the cargo ship NCL Salten, bound for the western town of Orkanger, ran aground around 5 am.
Mr Helberg's home on the shore in Byneset, a neighbourhood of Trondheim in central Norway, saw the arrival of the massive cargo ship, which ran into trouble on Thursday morning.
Mr Helberg got to know about the unexpected visitor when a terrified neighbour, after ringing his doorbell several times without success, finally called him on the phone.
Speaking of the "unreal" moment, Mr Helberg told The Guardian that he was shocked to see a large ship when he went to the window. "I had to bend my neck to see the top of it. It was so unreal," he said.
The ship was only five or six yards from the bedroom, and it was looming over the home. Mr Helberg said the ship might have "picked up speed and smashed into the house" if its vector had been a little different.
Ships often enter the fjord by turning left or right. Mr Helberg, who has been a resident of the property for 25 years, remarked, "But this went straight ahead. It was very close to the house."
"It's completely surreal," Mr Helberg, a retired museum director, said in a New York Times interview on Thursday.
Mr Helberg said his neighbour, like many other Norwegians, had been "in shock all day" after witnessing the ship crash into the shore.
Jostein Jorgensen, his neighbour, claimed he was awakened at approximately five in the morning local time by the sound of a ship racing towards land and hurried to Mr Helberg's residence immediately.
Mr Helberg's cabin's heating pipe was damaged by the ship, but he told television channel TV2 that it could have been much worse.
The ship, registered in Cyprus, had 16 crew members, including Russians, Norwegians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians. No oil spills or injuries were reported.
Chief executive Bente Hetland of NCL said that the ship's owners were cooperating with the authorities to assess the ship's damage and work towards safely "refloating the vessel and restoring normal operations as fast as possible."
