The last time Dubbo had a flood, the city ended up on a boil water alert for just over a month and while there hasn't been enough time for council to do a full analysis from the last problem, Cr Dickerson said there were some things the council staff has learnt.

"That last flood, especially the Little River, that I jokingly said was misnamed because it was the big river for a few days there, brought a lot of that debris down," he said.

According to Cr Dickerson that included carcasses and faeces.

"Some of that debris created that very turbid water, but that's all been flushed through in terms of that flood event," he said.

Cr Dickerson said since most of the debris has been washed away, there wouldn't be much debris to be brought down a second time.

"The Little River has had a lot of that brought down and the Macquarie River has had a lot of that brought down from the river banks," he said.

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DRC staff have got new processes in place, should an incident such as this happen again in the future.

"In terms of the different way they treated the water as the turbidity of the raw water coming in increased, then the treatment process obviously was modified," he said.

With more bores coming along, Cr Dickerson has confidence they will be part of the solution for the future.

"If you have got more bores you can switch over to those bores rather then river water because those bores aren't effected by the turbidity of the river," he said.

"We've got more of those bores, more of the pipelines connecting there, they aren't operational yet but that's part of the medium term picture."

Cr Dickerson said if they had to get water from the bores, only a small amount is available and they wouldn't be able to do it urgently.

"We are still working our way through that process, so again it will be a bigger picture solution, that's not going to be a short term solution," he said.

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