Clean waterways
Our City has many rivers and open water bodies which require careful maintenance and monitoring
Water quality devices
We work together with other organisations, local environmental groups and our community to help keep our waterways and water bodies clean.
The dashboard below provides updated information on the cleaning of our Water Quality Devices and open water bodies.
Water Quality Devices are things we build to keep our waterways clean. These can include artificial wetlands, floating litter booms or trash racks across open stormwater drains. Most of them are hidden underground and are directly connected to underground stormwater drains.
Move your cursor over the points on the map to see when the last clean occurred and details of type of material removed.
Blue-green algae
The dashboard below provides updated information on blue-green algae (BGA) alert levels and bacterial content of our open water bodies and several waterway sites in the Georges River catchment.
Both BGA and bacterial content are sampled as part of Council’s Water Quality Monitoring Program, which monitors 18 sites in Canterbury-Bankstown.
The tables explain what the alert levels and bacterial content indicate. Only some species of BGA are toxic, and contact with water is a concern only when it has reached red alert level. When this occurs, we communicate the alert levels with warning signs and online messages to the community. We also continue to monitor and treat algae as needed.
Note that all sites sampled are non-recreational water bodies – this means swimming or contact with water is never recommended.
| BGA Alert Level | What This Means |
| No Alert (White) | Less than 500 cells/mL toxic BGA species or less than 0.04 mm3/L total biovolume |
| Green | Between 500 and 5,000 cells/mL of toxic BGA species, or between 0.04 to 0.4 mm3/L of total biovolume |
| Amber | Between 5,000 and 50,000 cells/mL of toxic BGA species or between 0.4 and 4 mm3/L total biovolume |
| Red | Over 50,000 cells/mL of toxic BGA species or over 4 mm3/L total biovolume |
| Bacterial Content | What This Means |
| <200 Enterococci/100Ml | Less than 200 enterococci organisms per 100mL of water is safe for people and animals to come into secondary contact with the water, meaning any contact which isn’t full immersion or swimming |
| >200 Enterococci/100Ml | More than 200 enterococci organisms per 100mL of water is unsafe for people and animals to come into secondary contact with the water, meaning any contact which isn’t full immersion or swimming |