5 MIN READ
06-27-2025
Rain Won’t Stop Us: A Cleanup Mission Against the Tide
Ucik, 4ocean Indonesia Content Correspondent
Storms Bring the Trash—We Bring the Team
The rain hadn’t let up in a week.
Each new tide dragged in fresh debris: driftwood, fishing nets, plastic bottles, snack wrappers, and even used medical waste. The beach—usually alive with visitors and calm waves—was eerily quiet, buried under waterlogged trash and thick mud.
When our crew arrived that morning, the downpour was relentless. The winds were strong, the surf unpredictable. There was hesitation at first. Should we wait? Should we come back when the skies cleared?
But the ocean didn’t pause. And neither did we.
Wearing raincoats, boots, and gloves, our crew began the cleanup—heads down, tools in hand. We worked through sheets of rain, hauling waste one sack at a time. Plastic was wedged deep in the sand. Foam clung to roots. Tangled nets stretched across the shoreline like spiderwebs.
Then came the heavy lifting.
A bulldozer arrived to help clear enormous piles of driftwood—logs too big to move by hand. While the machine worked, we combed through the mess, pulling out smaller waste buried underneath.
We removed a total of 463 pounds of waste from the beach, including 261.45 pounds of plastic and 201.55 pounds of mixed debris. Each sack was soaked, heavy, and difficult to carry—but every pound pulled from the shore felt like a hard-earned win in the fight against ocean plastic.
“At first, we almost stayed in the truck,” said one team member. “But the second we saw plastic washing back into the ocean, we knew we couldn’t leave it.”
There’s something about working through a storm that bonds you to the mission. Your clothes are wet. Your boots are sinking in mud. But your purpose? Crystal clear.
Even as the wind howled, the team moved in sync—some collecting waste by hand, others directing cleanup near the water’s edge. And slowly, the beach changed. From chaos to calm. From buried to beautiful.
Nature doesn’t wait for ideal weather—and cleanup work doesn’t either.
The hardest part wasn’t the rain or the mud. It was watching how fast the ocean could claim what people left behind. One tide in, and a beach becomes a landfill. One tide out, and it’s gone—until it comes back again.
That’s why we keep showing up. Because cleanups are more than just one-day efforts—they’re acts of care, of responsibility, of hope. And that day, soaked and smiling, we left knowing one thing for sure: we’d do it again tomorrow.
