A near miracle against the backdrop of GPS coordinates. An 81-year-old man, suffering from memory problems, was found this Sunday early in the afternoon after having gotten lost in the middle of the forest the day before, near the town of Bantzenheim in Haut-Rhin, report our colleagues from Latest News from Alsace.
Saturday mid-afternoon, Maurice's family is worried. The octogenarian, who went for a walk at the end of the morning, has still not returned. The alert was immediately given to the local police and firefighters. Because he got into the habit of long walks, Maurice was equipped by his daughters with a connected watch, allowing him to geolocate.
By consulting the GPS coordinates, his wife realizes that the last signal points to a departmental road. The octogenarian's relatives and the police quickly went to the scene, but when they arrived, Maurice was no longer there.
The local gendarmerie then publishes a disappearance report. The surrounding villages, as well as the German police and firefighters, were also notified, the town being located a few kilometers from the border.
An important security system was then put in place: around a hundred people mobilized and went looking for the old man. But night falls, and operations are stopped for fear of losing more people. The next day, a dog team and a thermal camera helicopter came to support the volunteers in this arduous task.
The firefighters ended up finding the trace of Maurice, who “ended up being found in a place where we had already passed the day before: we passed there a second, then a third time, more slowly, more carefully, and it was there we saw him raising his hand towards us,” explains Grégory Buch, the octogenarian’s son-in-law, to France 3. The man was within a radius of 200 m around the last GPS signal sent.
Without having drunk or eaten for several hours, Maurice spent the night outside in the freezing cold, the mercury having dropped to 2°C during the night. “He’s tough, that’s for sure. But it must be said that he has been walking on average 3 or 4 hours a day for a year. I don’t know if he would have held out otherwise,” breathes Grégory Bluch.
