The longest rainy season, which continues on the 50th day, has created a huge garbage island in the upper reaches of Soyang Lake, Inje-gun, Gangwon-do, famous for its clean waters.

A wide floating island was created on the river leading to Yanggu Bridge along the stem of Lake Soyang.

This is a place where floating objects regularly gather during heavy rains such as rainy seasons or typhoons.

Floating objects spread widely in the upper and lower streams of the bridge, reaching the vicinity of the marina of Sangsu-nari.

A large island is formed by floating objects entangled with tree branches, waste plastic, rubber, and vinyl.
This garbage island was created by collecting waste from Inje Naerincheon and Hapgang during the boring rainy season.

The Gangwon Regional Headquarters of Korea Water Resources Corporation, in charge of the area, is busy cleaning up collected garbage.

The boat is connected with a row of buoys to collect the floats in one place and bring them closer, and the excavator continues to scoop them up and load them onto the dump truck.

We are speeding up our work because the floats start to sink into the water after about 20 days and can adversely affect the water quality.

Director A, who supervises the work site, said, "Even at the end of last month, floats gathered and we removed about 300 units with a 25 ton dump truck for one week." .

The floats taken from the water will be piled up in a nearby vacant lot and then classified into wood and waste. The wood will be dried and distributed to residents for firewood purposes, and the entire waste will be landfilled.

However, due to rain news again this weekend, we are concerned about disruption to our work.

The Wonju Regional Environmental Office of the Ministry of Environment and the K-water Han River Basin Headquarters calculated that from July 24 to the last 10, the amount of suspended matter inflow into the upper stream of the Han River water system reached 66,000,300㎥.

Meanwhile, the amount of floating matter gathered in the upper reaches of Lake Soyang due to heavy rain for the last three years was 8,700㎥ in 2017 and 5,900㎥ in 2018.

Last year, it didn't happen because it rained less.

(Photo = Yonhap News)