Assessment of Heavy Metals and Radioactivity Concentration in Drinking Water Collected From Local Wells and Boreholes of Dutse Town, North West, Nigeria

Shittu Abdullahi^1, , Chifu E. Ndikilar², A. B. Suleiman² and Hafeez Y. Hafeez²

¹Department of Physics, Gombe State University, Gombe, Nigeria

²Department of Physics, Federal University Dutse, Dutse, Nigeria

Cite this paper:
Shittu Abdullahi, Chifu E. Ndikilar, A. B. Suleiman and Hafeez Y. Hafeez. Assessment of Heavy Metals and Radioactivity Concentration in Drinking Water Collected From Local Wells and Boreholes of Dutse Town, North West, Nigeria. Journal of Environment Pollution and Human Health. 2016; 4(1):1-8. doi: 10.12691/jephh-4-1-1

Abstract

The study examined the heavy metals and radioactivity concentration of drinking water in 24 sample locations collected from Dutse town. The samples were divided into groups namely: Borehole and well water samples. It was first analyzed for heavy metals using Atomic Absorption Spectrometer (ASS). The mean concentration computed for borehole water samples were 0.006, 0.04, 0.03, 3.419, 0.029, 0.399, 1.867 and 0.089 mg/l for Cd, Co, Cu, Fe, Pb, Mn, Hg and Ni respectively and the mean computed for well water samples were 0.001, 0.041, 0.0002, 0.597, 0.002, 0.097, 2.632 and 0.002 mg/l for Cd, Co, Cu, Fe, Pb, Mn, Hg and Ni respectively. The samples were later study for gross alpha and radioactivity using MPC-2000, a low background alpha and beta detector. The mean activity for gross alpha and beta were 0.085 and 18.60 Bq/l respectively for borehole water samples and 0.329 and 508 Bq/l for well water samples respectively. An attempt was made to determine the correlation between gross alpha and beta activity, which yielded fairly good correlation of 0.72 for well water samples and poor correlation of 0.23 for borehole water samples. The correlations were improved when an outlier was removed from each correlation plot. This suggested that the outlier had unduly weight in the correlation. The results obtained were also compared with other previous works. This study reveals that some areas exceeded the maximum recommended level set by WHO and NSDWQ for safe drinking water especially the samples collected from wells for radioactivity and those collected from boreholes for heavy metals. Therefore, the sampled locations were contaminated with both heavy metals and radioactivity. We recommend that the water should be treated for both heavy metals and radioactivity before consumption.

Keywords:
heavy metal gross alpha gross beta borehole well drinking water Dutse town

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