Ambulance services stopped in Karachi

All the ambulance services in the city closed their operations on Thursday after the record-breaking rainfall in the city, which added to the miseries of the people.

One of the families severely affected by the closure of ambulance services was of Kamran Mansoor whose sister passed away at the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation (SIUT) at around 2:30pm and his family could not find any ambulance until late in the night.

“Without any cold storage facility, the body of my sister has been in SIUT’s Deewan Farooque building since last five hours,” he told The News, adding that no ambulance service was ready to fetch her sister’s body to the Edhi morgue in Sohrab Goth. “We have tried Edhi, Chippa, Al Khidmat, Aman and several other private ambulance services,” he shared.

It was raining so heavily that Mansoor could not even transport the body to the nearby Civil Hospital. He said they were also worried that if the ambulance broke down in the rainwater, what they would have to do with the body.

The hospital staff, he said, was continuously asking him to shift the body to some cold storage as soon as possible.Meanwhile, speaking to The News, Abdul Sattar Edhi’s grandson Saad Edhi shared that their largest ambulance service in Karachi remained completely suspended due to Thursday’s unprecedented rainfalls in the city. He said that they could not bring out their ambulances on roads due to heavy floods.

“Around four to-five boats are present on II Chundrigar Road, Qayyumabad and in District Korangi,” he said, adding that apart from the boats, they were running their heavy trucks to rescue the people stuck in floods.

Aman Ambulance service’s official Murtaza told The News that they only resumed their ambulance service in the city when the rain halted for a while and that too for emergency cases, not for the transportation of bodies.

He lamented how he was struggling in dealing with an emergency case of a woman who slipped and had her leg bone fractured in the Gulshan-e-Iqbal area and there was no ambulance to take her to the hospital. “I am in contact with her husband, Hafeez Baloch, but cannot do anything.”

When The News contacted Baloch, he said that his wife slipped due to rainwater inside their home and broke her leg at around 4:30pm and until 9pm, she couldn’t even get first aid.“There’s so much water outside my home, that I cannot even take her to a nearby clinic in my car,” he said, adding that his wife was on bed and he was using turmeric to help alleviate her excruciating pain.

He said that he had contacted the Chippa, Edhi, Aman Foundation and all other services, but due to floods, no ambulances could make their way to his home.