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A heroic father of Taranaki credits the children’s cartoon character Dora the Explorer with saving his life after being trapped up to his waist in mud while rescuing a girl and her grandfather from a rapidly rising river.
Kerri Broughton had pulled the girl, who she thought to be about 8 years old, from the Waitara Marshes when a queen tide came in.
SIMON O’CONNOR / Things
Kerri Broughton, pictured with her six-year-old daughter, Shakyah, rescued another girl from the Waitara River marshes.
As the 48-year-old Waitara man tried to free himself and the girl’s grandfather from the thick, deep noise, he remembered a trick from one of Shakyah’s favorite movies, his 6-year-old daughter Dora and the lost city of gold.
“In the movie they get caught in quicksand and she [Dora] He tells them to lie on their backs and distribute their weight. “
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Paramount images
Kerri Broughton used Dora the Explorer’s advice to escape alive from the waist-deep mud.
“I did it and it worked. I’m not kidding, ”said the father of three, laughing.
Broughton had never expected the children’s television cartoon of Dora, an adventurous 7-year-old girl, and her live-action outing on the big screen, to enter his thoughts as he enjoyed the last light of the Thursday night sun. while fishing on the banks of the Waitara River. .
Supplied
In the movie Dora, the lost city of gold, Dora and a group of friends emerge from the quicksand by laying down.
Sitting near the Waitara Soccer Club, he heard screaming, but attributed it to the game behind him and the group of children playing across the river.
Five minutes later he heard the noise again, this time from another direction, but when he couldn’t see anything he sat down again.
Then the screams grew louder and more piercing.
“So I went to the edge of the shore and looked upriver and I could see this person at the edge of the marshes.”
A girl was waist-deep alone in the marshes unable to escape the incoming tide.
“I watched the tides, and they were real tides, and they were coming fast,” he said.
“I made the call to drop anything and I made the call to run.”
Running towards the screams, Broughton saw an old man with a dog in a nearby parking lot, and after yelling at him for help he realized that it was the girl’s grandfather who had lost sight of her.
After running another 200 meters through tall grass, gorse and unstable terrain, he caught up with the girl.
“She was just crying, ‘Please help me.’
“I told him my name and I said, ‘I’ll get you out, I promise.’
Broughton said the girl had moved about five steps away from the hard surface of the floors and sunk, leaving her waist-deep in the mud.
Supplied / Stuff
Dora the Explorer started out as a cartoon character before becoming a live action movie.
But Broughton wasn’t immune to it, and every time she tried to pull it out, it sank.
Digging under the girl’s feet, he managed to push her up and out of the mud and onto the hard ground.
But Grandpa had also come to help and got stuck, leaving Broughton and the man struggling to get out as the tide came in.
With the closest people more than 200 yards away at the soccer club, and fearing they might not be able to go out alone, Broughton had to think quickly.
“’Do you trust me?’” He said to Grandpa. “Lie down, friend.”
Broughton lay on his back in the mud, exactly as Dora did when she got stuck in quicksand and her feet came out of the mud.
“I leaned back and crawled out.”
After convincing Grandpa to do the same, he was able to pull from under his arms to free him and they were safe, with the tide only half a meter away.
“He was absolutely covered in mud from head to toe. My clothes fell off because there was a lot of mud.
“I lay down on the floor to catch my breath. I was like, ‘Wow, did that really happen?’ “
Grandpa thanked Broughton, who was in shock.
Broughton said he had to walk away before losing his cool with the man for taking his eyes off the girl.
Simon O’Connor / Stuff
A photo of the Waitara River shows mud at low tide. (File photo)
“To be honest, he was very angry.”
Broughton said he had never let Shakyah and his older brothers Javiah, 13, and Kyson, 16, go down the river alone.
In 2004, Broughton suffered three prolapsed discs in his back and a fractured vertebra while playing in the Taranaki Rugby League Grand Final after cutting his shoulder to the neck.
He required a 13 1/2 hour surgery and left him at home recovering for almost two years. Ten years later, another disc slipped into his spinal cord and he was operated on again.
“I haven’t really recovered,” he said. “Some mornings I wake up and can barely walk.
“It took me everything to free the girl and then try to help get Grandpa out of the mud.
“Even to this day, I still can’t believe it.
“Another 20 minutes and that girl would have been underwater and no one would have found her until low tide the next morning.”
