Police is the Northern Kempen District used a drone equipped with a heat camera to successfully find a man, who had gone missing. Six hours after he went missing the octogenarian was found in a bog suffering from hypothermia.
It was Friday evening when local police issued a missing notice for 80-year-old Jan Stoffels. He had last been seen in Meerle (Hoogstraten – Antwerp Province) around 4PM.
Police decided to deploy a drone to search the forests around Hoogstraten and particularly the area where Jan had gone missing.
“We’ve been working with a drone equipped with a heat camera for a couple of months now. At a certain point a colleague noticed a heat image in the bog behind a forest” says police spokeswoman Els Dellafaille.
“We rushed to the scene and encountered the missing man. He was standing by a tree but had sunk up to 40cm into the bog. He was suffering from hypothermia. An ambulance sped to the scene to allow medics to provide first aid”.
Jan’s condition has meanwhile improved, but he is believed to be suffering from dementia.
“He was missing for 6 hours in total. Without our drone he wouldn’t have been found so soon” says Dellafaille.