"It's grim work, uprooting these lives," said Gordon, who will move hundreds of families from three bridges.
Officials say the project is part of a flood control and beautification effort. The wrecking crews often come with armed soldiers and violence has occasionally erupted, housing advocates say.
A recent Metropolitan Manila Development Authority report estimated that one in three Manila residents are squatters -- at least 540,000 families. Some 70,000 families live in wood and metal huts along creeks and rivers, blocking water flow with their refuse, the report said.
In this harsh lifestyle, residents say, water is the enemy and it attacks from both above and below.
Rain pounds down, and sometimes, when typhoons hit, the swollen river rises to flood their rickety wooden huts, which are moored a few feet above the river water and stuck to the side of the bridge's concrete like barnacles.
During major storms, "it comes to our knees," said Avelino Cabral, 54, who has lived here four years. "Sometimes, we stand up all night. We cannot leave because the river might wash our homes away."
The Malabon also brings sickness. Many residents suffer skin lesions from contact with the unsanitary water. There's also dysentery and tuberculosis.
Ana Recto, an 8-year-old girl with large brown eyes, lay on a mat near her mother. She was throwing up and running a fever, but the family of eight had no money for medicine, even aspirin.
"She's sick from the water," said her mother, Evelyn Recto, 43. "All these children are inhaling bad things from the water."
Not long ago a baby here was delivered by a midwife. The whole community worries about its welfare.
Falling so deeply into poverty that you call the guts of a bridge your home is easy in the Philippines. Many families come to Manila from the countryside to encounter a city teeming with people but bereft of opportunity.
The Rectos have relatives in Malabon, but the family land has already been so subdivided there is no room for them. So father Mauricio Recto, 53, finally went in search of a bridge to live under. Most were full of squatters. But he kept looking, driven further into the unspeakable filth of Manila's industrial district.
That's where in 2004 he found his consolation prize -- the C-4 bridge.
Soon, 13 families -- all of them strangers -- collected here. They agreed to protect one another and appointed a board of elders to settle disputes.
