It’s not every day that you sleep through someone parking a 135-meter cargo ship in your yard, but in Norway, it isn’t never either.
As Johan Helberg slept, the huge cargo ship cruised out of control and came careening through his yard. The boat, which was manned by a sleeping crew, lost control and drifted straight into his Fjordside retirement home. By some stroke of luck, the enormous ship narrowly missed hitting his relatively tiny house.
The Norwegian man was so deeply asleep when the cargo ship came riding up into his yard that he didn’t even stir until someone came to check on him. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg said, in the most typical show of Norwegian hospitality I’ve ever heard.
“I was sure that he was already outside, but no, there was no sign of life. I rang the doorbell many times and nothing,” his neighbour said.
Looking out his window before he opened his door to the unwelcome, intrusive neighbour, he was stunned to see his garden featuring a new, large ornament. “I went to the window and was quite astonished to see a big ship,” he told The Guardian. “I had to bend my neck to see the top of it. It was so unreal.”
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The cargo ship missed the man’s house as it came riding up into his yard by mere meters. Had it been going faster, or only a few degrees in another direction, it could have smashed his house to tinder. “Five metres further south and it would have entered the bedroom,” the Norwegian man noted.
The navigator on board at the time of the cargo ship crash has been charged with negligent navigation. According to the AP, he was asleep at the wheel, leading the boat astray. There is a time and a place to have a nap. The helm of a cargo ship is not it.
The boat is being moved from the man’s yard. Apart from a few crushed flowerbeds and a Norwegian man roused from his antisocial existence, there was no real damage.