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Lake Parramatta Reserve

Lake Parramatta is a decommissioned drinking water reservoir located approximately 3km north of the city of Parramatta. The Lake has a surface area of 10.5 hectares and holds when full 450 mega-litres of water. It was created by damming the Hunts Creek valley. The reservoir is 13 metres deep at the dam wall reducing to 2 metres in its upstream reaches. The Lake’s foreshores are largely comprised of coastal bushland overlying Narrabeen/Hawkesbury sandstone typical of many coastal parts of the Sydney Basin.

The Upper Parramatta River Catchment Trust determined in 1997 to implement work leading to the Lake so that water quality can become ‘swimmable’ once again for visitors. To this end it has undertaken several monitoring and environmental studies. In discussions with the Trust, CWWT proposed a project of 3 stages to collect microbiological and related data needed to understand the severity and sources of water borne pathogens with a view to remediating the catchment and minimising the exposure of users to water borne pathogens. This new risk based management approach was proposed in line with new NHMRC (2005) recreation guidelines. The three stages were:

  1. Evaluation of Lake microbial water quality based on readily available historical data and a initial Sanitary/Reconnaissance Survey of contamination (Roser and Ashbolt 2004b, 2004c);
  2. Assessment of microbial water quality and health risk during Dry Weather (Roser et al. 2005) and identification of management actions which might lead to primary recreation being viable;
  3. An assessment of microbial water quality and health risks arising due to Hazardous Events (principally high rainfall/run-off) and assessment of management strategy viability.

On December 3, 2006, the Upper Parramatta River Catchment Trust and Parramatta City Council launched the Lake Parramatta Freshwater Festival which officially re-introduced swimming in the lake under club managed events. In 2008, Council will be preparing a Water Safety Plan for the Lake to identify and assess risks and propose intervention measures to minimise the level of risk.

Lake Parramatta Reserve
Caption: Lake Parramatta Reserve

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