Why a humpback whale rescue in Norway ended with three villages offline and a £150,000 bill

What looked like a whale tangled in fishing rope turned out to be something far more unusual. Off Tromsø in Norway, an overnight rescue to free a distressed humpback ended with damaged internet infrastructure, weeks of disruption for three villages and a six figure demand for repairs.

On a cold, snowy night in January, Audun and a friend headed out to sea off Tromsø after a humpback whale became badly entangled. From a distance, they believed the animal was caught in fishing rope. Up close, the situation was more serious.

Audun later said the whale was struggling to stay afloat and was clearly distressed. He also recalled a moment that makes the whole story feel almost unreal. After a while, he said, the humpback seemed to realise the people around it were trying to help. It came in so near that Audun was able to touch it several times.

That closeness mattered because the rescuers needed to work out exactly where the line was trapping the whale. Audun took photographs to pinpoint its position, and he and his friend tried to cut the material free with a knife mounted on a pole. At that stage, they still thought they were dealing with rope.

The clip below captures part of the rescue.

What they were cutting was not rope at all

The surprise at the heart of the rescue only became clear once the effort was underway. The material wrapped around the humpback was not fishing gear, but a metal coated internet cable.

That changed the scale of the problem immediately. A pole mounted knife was one thing to use on rope in dark, difficult conditions. A cable with metal in it was something else entirely. Even after the coastguard arrived, the whale remained trapped.

Audun described the operation as incredibly frustrating. He said that for five hours the rescuers tried everything they could think of, but the darkness made it too hard to see what they were doing. Eventually, there was no way around it. The attempt had to be called off until daylight.

That left the humpback to battle through the night still entangled. The image Audun captured from the scene, showing the whale below the surface with rescuers above, underlined how tense the standoff had become. The animal was still alive, still fighting and still attached to a cable that was never supposed to be in its way.

How the whale was finally freed

The rescue continued into the morning, when a fire and rescue diver managed to rupture the wiring enough to break it. That finally released the whale.

It swam away, but not without signs of what it had been through. Its body was marked, and Audun said it likely suffered injuries to its baleen. The account does not suggest anyone knows exactly how badly hurt the humpback was beyond that, only that the entanglement left visible marks and likely damage.

The bigger mystery is how the whale became caught in the first place. Audun said he does not know how it ended up so badly entangled. His best explanation was that the cable should have been lying flat on the seabed, but perhaps a loop had been sticking up and caught in the whale's mouth as it dived for herring.

That detail makes the whole episode even stranger. This was not a case of an animal becoming trapped in gear floating at the surface. It appears to have involved underwater infrastructure that, in normal conditions, should not have been protruding in a way that could snare a feeding whale.

The rescue also says something about how close the humpback came to people in the middle of a crisis. Audun's recollection that the animal approached after appearing to understand help was being offered is one of the most remarkable parts of the story. In the middle of freezing weather, poor visibility and a highly technical problem, there was also a living, stressed animal choosing to stay near the people trying to free it.

The rescue had an expensive aftermath

The whale's escape was not the end of the story. Damage to the cable left three villages without internet or mobile connection for several weeks.

So the rescue had a second impact beyond the obvious danger to the animal. While the humpback swam free, local communities were left dealing with the loss of basic communications. A dramatic wildlife emergency had turned into a major infrastructure problem.

When the area finally came back online, the aftermath became even more unexpected. Audun and the Fire and Rescue department both received an email from the telecoms company that owned the cable. It demanded £150,000 to cover the repair costs.

That price tag is part of why the rescue has drawn so much attention. At one level, it is a deeply emotional wildlife story about a humpback in distress and the people who went out in snow and darkness to help it. At another, it is an almost unbelievable collision between nature and modern technology, with an undersea internet cable at the centre of the emergency.

Audun is a professor in the Department of Arctic and Marine Biology at the University of Tromsø and has also worked as a professional wildlife photographer for the past eight years. In this case, he was not just documenting wildlife. He was part of a rescue that ended with a freed whale, damaged communications infrastructure and one enormous bill.

Few rescues combine all of that in a single night. A humpback was saved. Three villages went offline. And what first looked like rope turned out to be the kind of obstacle almost nobody would guess: the internet itself.