An ocean of trash washes up on central Vietnam beaches

The huge amounts of rain dumped by the northeast monsoon over the last few days on Vietnam’s third largest city, Da Nang, has had some unsavory after effects.

The downpours have pushed out a huge amount of waste from domestic sewers into the sea and this has also washed up on Da Nang’s beaches.

Several beaches including the ones in Son Tra, Thanh Khe and Lien Chieu districts are littered with garbage, and the dumping continues. 

A pile of waste from the sewer on Ton That Dam Street in Thanh Khe District comes ashore, accompanied by black wastewater.

In Da Nang, wastewater and rainwater are collected by the same sewers. When they get flooded by heavy downpours, this is dumped in the ocean. 

Nguyen Duc Vu, head of the Son Tra Peninsula and Da Nang Beaches Management Department, said the large scale dumping of garbage has happened on 15 kilometers of Da Nang’s coast.

Rotting fish among the garbage made the place stink. 

A large part of the dumped garbage was plastic waste.

My Khe Beach, one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, looks like a dumpster now, despite efforts to clean up the trash by municipal employees and residents, as the waves continue to deposit trash. Many foreign tourists took pictures of the beach full of garbage.

An angler returns with his "catch."

"I’ve never seen such a huge amount of waste dumped into the ocean like this," he said.

Irrigation expert Huynh Van Thang said that it was not just that the sewer system unable to keep pace with the city’s urbanization, but that the huge amounts of garbage stuck inside the sewers led to slow drainage, causing floods each time it rained heavily.

"We have collected over 10 tons of garbage on Tho Quang and My Khe beaches in just two days, and this is just only about one-third of what has been dumped," said Vu with the Son Tra Peninsula and Da Nang Beaches Management Department.

Da Nang has prioritized cleaning up My Khe Beach for tourism purposes.

One official from the Da Nang Beaches Management Department said: "There is so much garbage; we hope people in the city can work together to bring the beaches back to their original state as soon as possible."