Video transcript
I'm here in the suburban area that sits along side the Field of Mars Reserve. I'm also standing within the Buffalo Creek catchment area. All the water that falls as rain here will run downhill across the urban landscape directly into Buffalo Creek. As the water travels it collects litter, soil, oil and grease. This is known as stormwater.
Down here on Buffalo Creek I'm making observations about the water quality. It appears the water is really cloudy and there's lots of litter. So we're going to do some tests to test the water quality. Water quality determines how healthy the waterways are. It's ability to sustain life.
Once we have safely collected the water we are going to conduct 3 tests. The first test is to test the turbidity of the water to see how cloudy it is.
If its too cloudy water plants can't get sunlight for photosynthesis and aquatic animals find themselves swimming through silt and gunk.
We slowly pour water into the turbidity tube until we can no longer see the pattern at the base of the tube. The higher the water gets in the tube the clearer the water is. Our results showed a slightly cloudy reading which is poor turbidity.
The second test we will conduct is for phosphates which are chemical pollutants which come from different products we use such as detergents when we wash our cars or fertilisers which we use on our gardens.
After filling a test tube with a small amount of water we will put in a special tablet designed to test phosphates into the water and give it a good shake until it dissolves.
The final test is for dissolved oxygen. This is the measure of how much oxygen is dissolved in the water. It's the amount of oxygen available to living aquatic organisms.
We will then leave the phosphate and oxygen tests to dissolve for 5 minutes to see if there is a colour change. Unfortunately we got an average result for phosphate. And an average result for oxygen as well. And we always make sure we safely dispose of our waste.
Another test that is good to conduct is how mush visual pollution you can observe in the creek.
End of transcript.