When Maple Crescent resident Chris Harvey turned his taps on for a refreshing drink on Tuesday, he wasn't expecting to see his glass fill with water the colour of tea.
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"It was shocking," he said. "It's been off colour now for at least six weeks."
Mr Harvey is not alone in his concerns for the quality of Blayney's water supply. Social media sites have been filled with posts of basins full of brown water.
The current situation with the discolouration of the water is only affecting those Central Tablelands Water customers in Blayney, whereas customers in Carcoar, Millthorpe and further west towards Eugowra have been spared.
CTW's Director of Operations and Technical Services Noel Wellham said that from a health standpoint the water is perfectly safe, the problem comes from heavy rains surrounding Lake Rowlands, a full dam and different filtration systems in the Blayney and Carcoar water treatment plants.
"When the water levels at Lake Rowlands are low any water from storms will enter the dam, slow down and won't overly disturb the water," he said.
"However, now that we're having these heavy deluges of rain and the dam continues to overflow, that dirty water that's flowing in isn't slowing down and all those minerals now come through to the front of the dam and it goes over the top.
"That flow of water prevents the minerals that are being washed down from the catchment from settling at the bottom of the dam."
The main cause of the discolouration is the mineral manganese and when it comes to removing this mineral from the water, the two different treatment plants use differing methods to treat the water.
"The treatment plant in Blayney was built in the 1960's and it's a sedimentation filter plant whereas the new water treatment plant we have in Carcoar is called a Dissolved Air Flotation Filter plant," Mr Wellham said.
To remove the manganese the Carcoar plant oxygenates the water causing the manganese to change from a solution form into a solid form. It's then filtered as per usual.
At the Blayney plant however, the older plant doesn't have a pre-oxidation facility and the manganese, being in solution and not a solid, didn't settle.
"Almost exactly 12 months ago we had a similar problem and we had NSW Health come through and they assisted in designing a pilot plant to try and get rid of the manganese before it enters the filtration plant," Mr Wellham said.
"Now we can hit the water with a Condy's Crystal solution and that's assisting us in reducing the amount of manganese that's flowing into the system."
Being a pilot plant, Mr Wellham said that there has been a bit of trial and error involved in getting the doses right.
"We have to go very carefully in how much we put in, and how much we put out to try and get the best effect of removing the manganese out of the system," he said.
That lag between discovering the manganese problem and fine-tuning the pilot plant has meant that the manganese has entered the mains supply causing concern across the town.
The problem is that the pipelines have become coated on the inside with the manganese and it's dropping off at different times Mr Wellham said.
"Now that we're increasing the water flow to try and flush or scour as much of the manganese as possible off the pipes, it stirs up every bit of minerals that's attached to the pipe," he said.
"It's a balancing act of using enough water to flush the lines, and still having enough water to service our customers. That's why it took us 12 hours to flush the pipes in one part of town."
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