Objectives Of The River Guardianz Project

PUB’s Active, Beautiful, and Clean, or ABC Waters Programme was introduced in 2006. ABC Waters is a programme that aims to transform our waterways and reservoirs into community and recreational spaces. To contribute to the success of ABC Waterways at Kolam Ayer, Bendemeer Secondary School adopted the Sungei Whampoa River as it is nearest stretch of river from our school.Our main aim is to educate the public, mainly residents living in the area as we believe most of the students from our school stay nearby. We also aim to play an active and exemplary role in ensuring that the water along the river is of good quality as eventually the water will flow to the Marina Barrage and eventually forms one of our Four National Taps in Singapore.

Implementation of Project

To carry out our River Guardianz project, we intend to carry out river patrol along the stretch of river on a fortnightly basis. During our patrol duty, we intend to clean up the river by cleaning up the river. We also intend to educate the public by talking to the residents and passerby in the area so as to encourage them to keep the waterways clean.
As this aims to create environmental protection and conservation awareness, we will not use brochures to educate the public as the residents may discard the brochures after reading it thus creating more wastes.
Thus we have decided to put up A2 size posters along the stretch of Sungei Whampoa River to educate and remind the public against polluting the environment.We aim to attract the younger generation in our save-the Earth movement. Thus we will continue to use our blog to constantly update them on the findings based on our patrol duty and other activities that we may have. We hope that this can entice the younger generation to visit our blogs and find out what we do. We hope that we can encourage and motivate some youngsters to join us in our save-the –environment movement.
As River Guardianz by informing the relevant authorities should we chance upon any major source of pollutions so that actions can be taken to rectify the situation.
We will also collect water samples from the river on a monthly basis and do some water quality testing of the water in the river.
We will use the data loggers that we have in our school to help us in the testing of the water quality. The data logger allows us to test the acidity of water, oxygen level, temperature of water as well as clarity of water in the river.
We will carry out the test once a month and we will analyse the results of the findings at the end of the year.
We intend to carry out the project during the June Holidays as it would be the best time for us to collect data and analyze it. We can also make use of this time to interact with the public which will make it easier us to explain the need of their cooperation to keep the river and its surrounding clean.

What We Hope To See

We hope that with the river clean up that we have conducted as well as the public education that would have taken place during our patrol duty, the quality of the water in the river will eventually improve over a period of time. During this period of time, we also hope to see fewer litters along the river as this can be used as an indicator to show that our hard work has paid off!

Why Sungei Whampoa

For very practical reason that it is very near to our school and it would be very convenient for us to carry out our patrol duty as well as sample collections.
We decided to adopt the Sungei Whampoa river as this river runs through Kallang River and eventually will flow to the Marina Barrage.
Hence the quality of water in the Marina Barrage will be very much affected by the quality of water at Sungei Whampoa.
We certainly hope that by keeping the water in Sungei Whampoa clean, there will eventually be cleaner water in the Marina Barrage.

River Clean up on 4th June

River Guardianz reporting by the Sugei Whampoa River.

Picking litter from the river ain't an easy task.

A 'Milky Way' found on the river..

Spot any familiar objects?

Waterways Watch Trainings Pictures

More pictures on WWS training.
Mavis doing a great job on cleaning up. Looks like she is well-trained (with the help of tongs and gloves) for the river cleaning 'battle'.

River Guardianz listening attentively...

Mr Sho doesn't mind getting dirty for the sake of environment. Kudos!


That's all for now, but there will be more coming up.
Time for River Guardianz to take a break have a kit-kat.

P/s Remember to throw your wrapper in the BIN and not the river.

Update on progress

On 4th of June , our river project's members went on our regular patrol along the river . We tried to do some cleaning up of the river by using the new net pole bought by the teacher-in-charge. To our surprise, the river was very clean on that day. We gathered that this is due to the heavy rainfall the night before which would have increase the volume of water in the river.
Nevertheless, we spotted a lot of pollutants along the side of the river as well as along the ledge of the bridge. We did a quick clean up of the area and collected one full trash bag of rubbish.
After our clean up, we sorted the various types of pollutants that we picked up.
We also noticed some dirty water (filled with oil slick).

Here are the list of items that we found in or near the river.

(Click on table for clearer view)

Toodles!