In the middle of the night, a hypothermic man was rescued from a stream in a field by the police after a local resident heard cries for help through the window in the municipality of Kluisbergen, in the East Flanders province.
The woman, who sleeps with her window open, was awakened in the middle of the night on Friday by cries for help. But she could not see who needed help and called the emergency centre of the local police zone shortly after 03:00.
"The woman heard the cry for help in the distance," police chief Joost Duhamel told VRT. "Our intervention teams immediately drove to the scene and actually heard someone shouting who could not immediately be located. Given the freezing temperature and the very vast area, they knew they had to act quickly."
Civic responsibility
An intensive search was launched and after half an hour, the victim – a man in his thirties – was found hypothermic in a boggy field. He had probably gotten into trouble after a night out. "The search was not easy: it was pitch black, and the man's voice was getting weaker and weaker until he stopped answering the calls of our teams," Duhamel said.
The man was sitting with his feet in a stream and had a body temperature of only 33°C. It took several police officers to rescue him from the boggy field and get him into the ambulance for urgent care.
The police thanked the woman who called the emergency services for her alertness at night, and stressed that the man narrowly escaped an unfortunate death from freezing thanks to her. "Ultimately, this was a fine example of civic responsibility and efficient action by our police officers."
