Months of brown, smelly water have left Yass residents furious about the state of the town's water supply, which some homeowners have described as "unfit for human consumption".
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Dozens of pictures of brown and yellow water have been posted on Facebook by outraged residents, in groups such as "Clean Water Yass", and two online petitions have started on Change.Org calling for the council to take action.
But the council insists the water is safe and that the discolouration is caused by the level of manganese in the water, a result of the town's freshly-expanded dam.
Long-time Yass resident Brenda Jaggers said the water was unfit for any household purpose, forcing her to buy up to nine 10-litre containers of fresh water from Aldi every week.
She said about 30 tropical fish in a tank in her home died after she refilled it with water from the town's supply on Monday, leaving her with just three and costing her about $4000.
"You can't have a bath, you can't have a shower, you wash your clothes and it smells and they come out grey. We spend up to $60 a week on bought water from the supermarket," she said.
"We're paying the Yass council top dollar for water and we can't drink it. We have to suffer in silence ... I wouldn't even give this water to my dogs."
Mrs Jaggers said the water had been bad in Yass over the past four to five years, but there had been a noticeable deterioration over the past 18 months.
She said more than 5500 people across the city had been affected by the brown water.
"It's unfit for human consumption and there's people in the town that have little babies."
Resident Dimity Smith said she went away over the past weekend and when her family returned, the water that came out of their faucets looked like mud.
She blamed the water for her seven-year-old son's rash, which he acquired since arriving in Yass.
"It wrecks the shower head [and] you can see all in the grouting and your shower, it's all orange. We've been through several kettles and my son has a rash," she said.
"He never had any skin problems before we moved [to Yass]. Normally eczema starts as babies and the doctors say it's not eczema. They tried to treat it as a fungal infection and it's not that either."
Ms Smith said the council had told them the problem was the city's underground pipes and it would cost too much money to fix, but she believed clean water was a basic human right.
"If it's a money issue, then they have to find it from somewhere. I don't know the ins and outs of what the budget's like, but it's a human right and I think it's important to everyone in our area that we have clean water," she said.
Yass deputy mayor Michael McManus said Yass had just finished a $23 million upgrade of the town's dam, which would secure their water system for the next 50 years.
He said water inversion at the new dam had partly led to the water discoloration, because of the level of manganese in the water and the farmland adjacent to Yass' water supply.
"It's been going on for a number of months and our engineering department are on top of managing it. It's a brand new world for us," he said.
Mr McManus said he did not have any timeline for when the problem would be fixed, but said the water was completely safe for human consumption.
"It's a significant problem for us," he said. "It's a high ion level in our water, now we've got this inversion problem with manganese ... [However] it doesn't look good, it doesn't taste good, but it isn't detrimental to your health."
A study of the Yass water supply done by the council found the water was safe – the levels of manganese were within the acceptable 0.5mg/L range.
