Climate change to blame for continued water issues in Dubbo according to mayor

Restrictions were eased on Sunday morning, with the mayor saying he was hopeful this would be a one time event.

"We are seeing with climate change that we are getting a whole range of things that are happening in our water ways across the nation, across the planet, that are unusual events and that's exactly what happened here with the algae levels that came down," he said.

"They're algae levels we haven't seen before, so the normal treatment processes we would have in place were not able to cope with that and it came back to the turbidity level again."

From roughly 3.30pm on Friday, January 13, higher than average amounts of organic material from the Macquarie River were drawn into the water treatment plant, resulting in a temporary shut down so backwashing could begin.

When Dubbo had a boil water alert in July 2022, turbidity reached 0.6 but the nephelometric turbidity units (NTU) only had a threshold of 0.5.

It looked close to reaching that level once again before council managed to rectify the issue.

"When we detected getting close to that level, that's when our staff shut down the water treatment plant and stopped putting water into our reservoirs and looked at ways we could treat that," Cr Dickerson said.

"We restricted those levels of usage, that means the amount of water we had in the reservoirs was enough to get by for that day while our staff worked around the clock, and congratulations to the hard work they did. They were confident we could keep producing water below that 0.5 NTU."

As of 9am Saturday, the town's reservoirs sat at 71 per cent full which may have resulted in poor water pressures at some properties.

"We hope that it's a one off but I think we will see a whole range of different things happening with our environment in the years to come which you wouldn't have expected in the past that may be normal in the future," he said.

When questioned about whether the treatment plant would need an upgrade due to the number of water issues for Dubbo Regional Council, the mayor was confident it wouldn't need an upgrade for a number of years but could perhaps use some "fine tuning" from staff.

Earlier in the week it was announced Wellington and surrounds was temporarily without fluoride in its water after a pump at the fluoride dosing system at Wellington's Water Treatment Plant failed.

That came as Dubbo's water supply remains un-fluoridated following the discovery last year that council had - unbeknownst to the public - not been fluoridating the local water supply for the past three-and-half years.

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During the middle of last year, Dubbo also went without clean drinking water for more than a week due to organic matter washing into the water treatment plant - an issue that even resulted in premier Dominic Perrottet commenting - while it was only in December when council was forced to alert NSW Health to an "earthy smell" in the city's drinking water.

"The constant monitoring we do at the plant...is a very important part of producing safe drinking water for the community, so we will have to continue to do that as we have done for decades," Cr Dickerson said.

He mentioned that being part of groups and alliances would be of vital importance to DRC.

"We created and are in a group called the Lower Macquarie Water Utilities Alliance that looks at best practice at treating water and that's along the Macquarie River, but there are various conferences that staff will attend, there will be learnings we will see," Cr Dickerson said.

"You may see changes going across the board in the way water is treated, to make sure we can keep producing water at the highest quality."

Councillor Dickerson said he could see the water treatment plant needing an upgrade in the next five to 10 years.

"The big picture is that the upgrade of the water treatment plant might be something different, there might be some different processes to be put in place," he said.

"At some stage in the next five to 10 years council will be looking at an upgrade as it needs to treat more water and different levels of water and at that moment in time, there will be some hard decisions to be made about what a water treatment plant looks like and there will be more learnings from across the nation at that point in time."

The mayor thanked the community for reducing water consumptions for the day and making it easier for staff to rectify the issue as soon as possible.

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