A thick, suffocating tide of discarded waste has engulfed a major river in Manila, the capital city of the Philippines, following several consecutive days of intense downpours that washed accumulated trash from surrounding urban areas into the waterway.
Footage of the disaster shows municipal cleanup workers wading through waist-deep, murky water littered with plastic containers, food packaging, rotting organic matter and other discarded materials, working tirelessly to gather and remove the massive volume of refuse that now covers the river’s entire surface.
The extreme rainfall that triggered this event is part of a broader pattern of intense weather events impacting the Southeast Asian archipelago, where poor urban waste management infrastructure has long left waterways vulnerable to massive trash accumulation during storm surges and heavy precipitation events. Environmental activists have repeatedly warned that uncollected municipal waste in densely populated urban neighborhoods of Manila regularly gets washed into connected river systems during monsoon season, creating severe risks to both aquatic ecosystems and public health for communities that live along the river’s banks.
The ongoing cleanup operation is expected to take multiple days to complete, as workers race to clear the waste before it flows out into Manila Bay, where it would exacerbate already critical marine pollution issues in the region.