See the cargo ship that crashed right into a man’s backyard in Norway and came within feet of plowing into his house

A 440-foot-long cargo ship ran aground beside a house in Byneset, Norway, on Thursday morning, local time.

“If the ship had hit the rocky cliff right next to it, it would have lifted up and hit the house hard. It wasn’t many meters off,” Johan Helberg, the owner of the house, told local newspaper Nidaros.

Helberg said he was asleep when the ship ran aground and did not know what happened until his neighbor alerted him.

“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?'” Helberg told The New York Times in an interview published Thursday.

There were 16 men aboard the NCL Salten, Helberg said in his interview with the Times. The boat was captained by a Norwegian, and its crew comprises Russians and Ukrainians, Helberg said.

Helberg told the Times that his neighbor, Jostein Jørgensen, was “in shock all day” after seeing the ship plow into their backyard.

Jørgensen told the local media outlet TV 2 that he heard the ship at around 5 a.m. local time.

“When I looked out the window, I saw a boat moving at full speed towards shore,” Jørgensen said, adding that he expected the ship to turn course initially.

But the ship only stopped moving when it was about “six to eight meters” from Helberg’s house wall, Jørgensen told TV 2.

The NCL Salten was transporting goods to Orkanger, a town in Trondheim, Norway, when the crash occurred, per TV 2’s report. The ship is owned by Baltnautic, a Lithuanian shipping company.

Baltnautic CEO Bente Hetland told the Times that “nobody was injured in the grounding.” She added that the company does not know “what caused the incident and are awaiting the conclusion of the ongoing investigation.”

Hetland told TV 2 that the NCL Salten had run aground twice before, both times in Norway. The ship ran aground in Hadsel in 2023 and in Ålesund in 2024.

Baltnautic did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

The Norwegian Coastal Administration said on Thursday that no injuries or oil spills had been reported. It added that Baltnautic and the salvaging company it hired could not “pull the ship off the ground at high tide” with a tugboat on Thursday evening.

“Geotechnical investigations will be carried out, and the shipping company’s salvage company is awaiting the results of these to determine whether special considerations need to be taken when the ship is to be pulled off. We expect the investigations to take some time,” the statement continued.

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