Pakistan is experiencing its worst floods in history after heavy monsoon rains and accelerated glacier melt in the country’s mountains. Extreme floods washed away houses, roads and bridges. The floods swept through farmlands and towns in Sindh and Balochistan, the provinces that were hit the hardest.
“Most of Sindh is under water. The crops are gone, lives ruined, livelihoods wiped out, roads swept away, houses destroyed or barely standing,” Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s Pakistan’s Minister for Climate Change, said on Twitter on Monday, adding that “one-third of Pakistan is under water.”
“Frankly, no one has seen this kind of downpour and flooding before,” Rehman said. “Pakistan has never seen an unbroken cycle of monsoons like this. Eight weeks of non-stop torrents have left huge swathes of the country under water.”
Khairpur by boat. Most of Sindh is under water.The crops are gone,lives ruined, livelihoods wiped out, roads swept away, houses destroyed or barely standing. The Navy is also deployed in inland Sindh and Balochistan.Where to pump/drain the water? There’s water everywhere. 🇵🇰 pic.twitter.com/CuaIaP6hNH
— SenatorSherryRehman (@sherryrehman) August 29, 2022
700,00 farm animals died
Cows and other farm animals were dragged away in the water. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, over 700,000 farm animals have died since the floods started in June.
Dog shelter flooded
The Lucky Animal Protection Shelter (LAPS) in the town of Charsadda flooded entirely on Saturday. “The water came so quickly that within minutes we were fighting against time to save the animals,” the shelter said on Facebook.
“One of the first steps we took was to immediately place the animals from every enclosure on the rooftops of their rooms with their food and ironically their ‘water’ bowls,” the shelter added. The animals on the roofs were rescued the next day by boat and brought to a safe, dry area in nearby Peshawar.
“There were 250 dogs. We rescued 200 dogs and then sent them to Peshawar. But then we rescued the remaining 50 dogs with boats the next day. We have 35 other dogs in cages,” Gulrez Ahmed, supervisor at LAPS, told news agency Reuters.
“The government did not provide any help, but we did it all by ourselves. We request the government to provide help and relief for us,” Ahmed said.
Zeba Masood, who founded LAPS, said the shelter is much needed in Pakistan because dogs “are terrorised by the people here.”
“It is difficult to make people understand that they should not harm animals, whether they are donkeys, dogs or cats. People just don’t understand that this is a sad thing,” she added.