Photo via Twitter user Wildrik Stoffer
For the past few years, Aad Peters has been tooling around Europe in a 42-foot-high, 230-foot-long replica of Noah's ark, bringing people onboard to check out his floating Bible-themed museum. His travels recently brought him to Urk, a small fishing village in the Netherlands—until his ship got battered by a storm of biblical proportions.On Wednesday, 66 MPH winds broke the massive boat free from the dock it was tied to, sending it careening into Urk's quaint little harbor, the NL Times reports. With a handful of people and apparently some live animals onboard, the boat careened into a jetty and slammed into a few nearby boats, causing some serious damage and sending several ships down to their watery graves, De Stentor reports.
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The seven people onboard made it off the ark without sustaining any injuries, but a few animals were stuck on the ship through the night, according to the NL Times. Emergency crews jetted out to the harbor to try to contain the damage and even sent a dive crew down to check out the boats that sank, De Stentor reports.
"Noah's Ark is on Urk unhinged," the town's mayor, Pieter van Maaren, wrote on Twitter. "The damage is quite considerable."Wednesday's mishap was not the first time Peters's boat lost control out on the high seas. Back in 2016, it slammed into a coast guard ship off the coast of Oslo, leaving a gaping hole in the wooden vessel's hull, the Guardian reports. According to the NL Times, the hulking ship almost sailed away on its own last month. But for Peters, Wednesday's crash was the worst he's seen so far.
"We have been on the road for years and have experienced many storms, but this has never happened before," he told Omroep Flevoland.Still, it's unlikely that Peters saw the wreck as some kind of act of God. He told VICE back in 2015 that he's not even religious, but rather "a storyteller" telling Bible stories that he thinks "need to be told."But on Wednesday Peters's story ended a little differently than Noah's, seeing as his ark was no match for the harsh demands of Mother Nature.Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.