Johan Helberg woke up on Thursday morning to find his backyard view of a Norwegian fjord transformed into the side of a giant ship.
A cargo ship, the NCL Salten, had run aground at about 5 a.m. on Thursday, barely missing his house on the shore in Byneset, a part of the city of Trondheim in central Norway.
The police said on Friday that their investigation was focusing on the officer guiding the ship, saying that he told them he had fallen asleep before the crash.
Mr. Helberg had slept through it all until alerted by a neighbor. “I was sleeping soundly, deeply, and then I heard a dinging sound, which I wondered might be my doorbell,” he said in an interview on Thursday night. “I thought, who in the world rings the doorbell at 5:45 in the morning? I looked out the window, and he said: ‘Haven’t you seen the ship?’”
The ship was towering over the house, having missed the bedroom by only five or six yards. Had its vector been slightly different, Mr. Helberg said, the ship could have “picked up speed and plowed into the house. It’s completely surreal.”
“I impressed myself by staying cool,” said Mr. Helberg, a retired museum director. “I have seen and been through worse.”
The neighbor, in contrast, had seen the ship come plowing onto land and had been “in shock all day,” Mr. Helberg said — as were many other Norwegians, startled to see photos and videos of a gigantic container vessel wedged onto an unassuming shore.
“Big ships pass us now and then,” Mr. Helberg said, but mostly at a distance, keeping to the deeper waters of the fjord.
“We don’t usually see ships right outside our living room window,” he added. “So this is especially strange.”
The Norwegian coastal authorities said in a statement on Thursday that no injuries or oil spills had been reported. The 440-foot-long ship had entered the fjord on the way to the town of Orkanger, the authorities said. On Friday the police said the investigation had come to focus on the officer on watch, who was not named.
“He has testified, and his explanation is that he fell asleep prior to the incident,” a police prosecutor, Kjetil Bruland Sørensen, said in an interview.
The explanation would have precedent. “It does happen, but it’s not something that should happen,” he said. “We have regulations that are supposed to create barriers and prevent ships from running aground because someone falls asleep.”
But rarely does a situation have so many near misses with the potential for catastrophic damage, he added. “The potential for serious damage was huge — both for those onboard, people on land, and of course regarding environmental consequences and material damages.”
The police were still investigating whether the officer was alone on the bridge, Mr. Sørensen said. “I want to emphasize that we have no grounds to suspect either the captain or the shipping company,” he added.
Such accidents happened occasionally, a spokeswoman for the Coastal Administration, Anette Bonnevie Wollebæk, said on Friday. “But I don’t think we ever experienced a containership running ashore in a garden before,” she added.
It was not immediately clear where the crew members were on Friday. Mr. Helberg said that there were 16 men onboard, with a Norwegian captain and a crew of Russians and Ukrainians. He said he and his partner had spoken with them, shouting from his yard up to the ship, to find out whether anyone was hurt, but that they had not addressed having crashed their boat on his property.
“This is a serious incident, and we are grateful that nobody was injured in the grounding,” Bente Hetland, the chief executive of the company that had chartered the ship, NCL, said in a statement. For now, Ms. Hetland added, “we do not know what caused the incident and are awaiting the conclusion of the ongoing investigation.”
Ms. Hetland said that NCL and the ship’s owner, Baltnautic, were working with the authorities, and that they were assessing damage to the ship and hoping to safely “refloat the vessel and restore normal operations as swiftly as possible.”
NCL and a salvage company tried to use a tugboat to pull the vessel at high tide on Thursday evening, but found they could not do so, the authorities said.
Mr. Helberg had his own ideas about what happened. He said that the fjord’s entrance bends a little, forcing ships that enter it to quickly turn. The NCL Salten, he said, adjusted course once but not twice — putting it on a path for his garden.
“I’ve actually seen a couple of ships before that seemed to go suspiciously far before realizing something was wrong,” he said.
By Thursday night, the ship was still stuck, and Mr. Helberg was fielding calls from friends, family, acquaintances and international news organizations.
Online, his friends and family expressed relief that he was OK — and teased him about his unexpected guest, with one writing, “Nothing beats the view from Byneset on a beautiful spring morning, does it?”
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