Spatial variation of health risk of groundwater for drinking water supply in Mingshan County,Ya'an City,China

Rural drinking water safety is a growing concern in China. This study investigated the health risk of pollution of groundwater for the drinking water supply in Mingshan County, Ya＇an City, in Sichuan Province, China, using 46 samples from the years 1991 to 2010. Carcinogenic, non-carcinogenic, and total risks were assessed by the model recommended by the United States Environmental Protection Agency （U.S. EPA）. Thematic maps of the risks caused by single and multiple factors were generated from inverse distance weighting interpolation （IDW） and the geostatistical analysis functions of ArcGIS. The results show that the carcinogenic risks caused by chemicals in groundwater for drinking water supply are low, within the acceptable interval for risk management. However, non-carcinogenic risks are high and the number of sampling sites with risk values exceeding the standards amounted to 29. Non-carcinogenic risks of Cr6＋, nitrate, fluoride, and Fe at sites 43, 46, 50, 64, 67, and 74 were the sources that caused high total health risk. This study reveals the risk level of groundwater quality and orders of treatment of pollutants, and provides a scientific basis for groundwater management in this area.

Water Leakages in Public Water Supply System and How to Prevent Them

The article addresses the results of effective water losses prevention in public water supply systems, focusing on procedures for monitoring hidden leaks as the main part of losses and as the first step to control and prevent them. The described methodology has been applied based on a cross-border cooperation between twin capital cities Vienna and Bratislava in the Central Europe Region within the project deWaloP （Developing Water Loss Prevention） and adopted in Bratislava Water Company （BVS） in the Slovak Republic. The paper provides a complex of simple and easily available practices for analyses of water distribution measurements bringing essential information as to the necessity to use advanced procedures to actively reduce leakage. These practices involve minimum night flows analyses, hydrodynamic pressures analyses, pinpointing of water leakages by working with valves in the water network, the methodology of setting alarm limits for measured data, as well as use of advanced practices to obtain missing topologic data. As the water infrastructure in former socialistic countries are in bad technical condition and the lack of pertinent operational data is a significant obstacle to the application of a more sophisticated methodology based on GIS and other information systems, the procedures focus on using the most simple way to evaluate and control water losses. Finally, the introduction of described methodology in Bratislava Water Company after many years of unsuccessful effort even with expensive sophisticated leakage equipment brought positive outputs and the graph line of water losses level is finally going down. The use of expensive multi-correlating equipment together with human resources on the basis of implementing the above described leakage monitoring will subsequently become more effective, as it shall pinpoint major leakages, disclosure and removal of that shall significantly contribute to the effective reduction of water losses.

Understanding the initial use stage of cement mortar lining in drinking water distribution systems:Silicon and aluminum as stability indicators

The cement mortar lining(CML)of commonly used ductile iron pipes can severely deteriorate the drinking water quality at the initial stage of use,but the behavioral characteristics of different elements release from the CML in this stage is still unclear.In this study,dynamic immersion experiments with new cement mortar lined ductile iron pipe reactors were conducted under different feed water hardness and alkalinity conditions.The results showed that the release of alkaline substances from the CML at the initial stage of use could strongly influence the pH of water,which consequently greatly impacted the release/precipitation behaviors of calcium,aluminum and silicon.The pH and aluminum concentration of the effluent water could reach 11.5 and 700μg/L within 24 hr of hydraulic retention time,respectively,under conditions of relatively lower hardness and alkalinity.Due to the pH elevation,calcium carbonate precipitation could occur even at much lower feed water alkalinity.Whereas the aluminum and silicon could keep release from the CML in soluble form at different hardness and alkalinity levels,and their release rate depended on the amount of calcium carbonate precipitation.Thus,aluminum and silicon were more suitable as indicators of the corrosion intensity at the initial stage of CML use rather than the traditional calcium carbonate precipitation potential.Appropriate feed water hardness and alkalinity levels for mitigating the initial intense corrosion of CML were proposed:hardness>40 mg/L(CaCO_(3)),alkalinity>100 mg/L(CaCO_(3)).