Believe. Brita Källqvist, 87, finds a man in the water, clinging to a boat. The port is deserted. No one can help her bring him up. “What the hell am I going to do, I think then.” But then Brita has a flash of genius.
Something is not right in the dark harbor. It is completely silent and deserted, but a small boat rocks strangely, it capsizes this way and that. The time is around 10.30pm on September 21st. Brita Källqvist, 87, is out for the last walk of the day with the dog Bell. She walks closer to see what is written on it.
“When I get there, there is a man in the water. He stays in the boat, he doesn’t scream, he doesn’t call for help. He’s probably a bit numb, won’t make it much longer. And I don’t look after anyone else,” she tells Aftonbladet, on the living room couch at home in the villa in Trosa. Here she talks about the incident, which Södermanlands Nyheter was the first to report on.
“I don’t have a mobile phone on me, so I can’t call 112. But then I see a lifebuoy.”
Brita Källqvist runs and retrieves the lifebuoy and discovers to her happiness that there is a rope attached to it. “I pull out the rope and throw out the lifebuoy for him. He grabs hold of the rope attached around it.”
The man is far too heavy for Brita to be able to pull him up to the edge of the quay, which is very steep. “It is a big man, who is also completely wet. What the hell am I going to do, I think.” But then she has a flash of genius. Further in the harbor, there is a boat loading area, which slopes down towards the water in a wide opening. She moves the boat, and then she starts towing the man along the quay.
“I pull the string until I get him to the opening and there I can pull him up. It’s going well,” she says. “And when he gets up, the dog starts barking at him,” she says with a laugh.
Three people who are at a conference in Trosa hear the sound of the dog barking and get there. Fortunately, one of the three is a nurse. “One of them calls 112, for an ambulance.”
It takes about 20 minutes before the ambulance shows up. In the meantime, the nurse takes care of the man. He says that he has been to the pub in Trosa. He is wet and cold, and Brita realizes that she can help even now. “I live near the harbor, so I run home to get my husband’s old bathrobe and some towels, so that he has something dry to wear,” she says.
When the ambulance arrives, the man’s body temperature is only 34 degrees, and the paramedics put heating blankets on him. “He must have been there for a while. But he is fully articulate. The ambulance driver takes my phone number, and the man is welcome to call, if he wants to.”
Brita tells us that she probably gets a real adrenaline rush when it happens, she acts wisely – but afterward comes the shock. “I’m shaking, all over me. I call my daughter and my son and tell them what happened. The son tells me to get a whiskey,” she says with a laugh.
The night after the incident, Bell notices that Math is agitated after the dramatic event. “The dog crawls under the covers in my bed and lies close to me all night. He usually never does that otherwise.”
The incident in Trosa harbor has caused a stir in the town. There are many who think that Brita is a hero. “You know, it’s a small town. People come up and hug me and say I’ve been good,” she laughs. Brita Källqvist rejects the praise. “That’s how all people would have acted,” she says. But in the end, she admits, “I was the right woman in the right place.”
Brita Källqvist, aged 87, is a retired elementary teacher and resides in a house in Trosa. She has three grown children, two sons, and a daughter, as well as four grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
Brita’s heroic actions in rescuing the man who was clinging to a boat in the deserted harbor have garnered her praise from the community. Despite her age, she proved that she was the right person to be in the right place at the right time. Brita’s quick thinking and resourcefulness ultimately saved a life, and she has become a symbol of bravery and selflessness in Trosa.