TAUNTON - The pet food pantry at First Parish church is reaching out for a helping paw after a flood last weekend destroyed thousands of dollars of medical supplies for needy cats and dogs.
“There was so much water. Right now, we’re starting to try to replace what we lost,” said Riley Parker Morgan, founder of Paw's Pantry, a non-profit pet food pantry run out of the basement of First Parish church at 76 Church Green in Taunton.
The combination of a blizzard earlier this month, followed by warmer temperatures and rain was too much for the pantry’s permanent sump pump to handle, Morgan said.
“Our sump pump got overloaded. It couldn’t keep up with the melting snow,” Morgan said.
When someone went to check on the building on Saturday, Jan. 13, he discovered the entire 2,000-square-foot pantry was covered in as much as five inches of standing water, Morgan said.
Morgan quickly put out a call for help on the Improving Taunton Facebook page. And several Good Samaritans came to the rescue.
One family stopped by with a portable sump pump while volunteers helped corral the floodwater with an improvised dam made of waterlogged dog beds. Another brought a wet vac.
“We vacuumed and squeegeed and mopped and ran a dehumidifier,” Morgan said.
Finally, all the water was gone and it was time to take stock of the damage.
“We didn’t lose as much as I thought we would when I first got the call,” Morgan said.
The pantry is set up like a pet store with aisles of metal shelving holding thousands of pounds of dry – make that formerly dry – goods, like cat and dog food and cat litter.
Fortunately, many of the supplies were on higher shelves and were spared.
But unfortunately, a box holding about $3,000 of medical supplies, including cat and dog worm preventatives and flea and tick collars, was ruined, she said.
“We were getting ready for March Madness medical month,” Morgan said.
Paw’s Pantry provides pet food and supplies free of charge for the pets of people who are homeless, low income, veterans, disabled and elderly.
And March is the month when the pantry offers free medical assistance to the animals it serves, Morgan said.
“We try to get all the animals receiving pet food from us as vetted up as possible. We call it March Madness because it gets so busy,” Morgan said.
Morgan has set up a YouCaring page for donations to help replace the ruined medical supplies and repair other flood damage at http://ift.tt/2BakBbB. YouCaring is a fundraising website for personal, medical and charitable causes.
Paw’s Pantry is open every Thursday from 10 a.m. to noon and also makes deliveries monthly to people who are house-bound and has pick up days in Fall River, Attleboro, Braintree, Seekonk and Cape Cod. For more information about Paw’s Pantry call 774-776-3554.
