Long-Term Drinking Water Quality Assessment Using Index and Multivariate Statistical Analysis for Three Water Treatment Plants of Erbil City, Iraq

Abstract

Safe source of drinking water is always considered as an essential factor in water supply for cities and urban areas. As a part of this issue, drinking water quality is monitored via a useful scheme: developing drinking water quality index DWQI. DWQI is preferably used as it summarizes the whole physicochemical and bacteriological properties of a drinking water sample into a single and simple term. In this study, an evaluation was made for three drinking water treatment plants DWTPs named: Efraz 1, Efraz 2 and Efraz 3 that supply drinking water to Erbil City. The assessment was made by testing thirteen physicochemical and two bacteriological parameters during a long period of (2003 – 2017). It has been found that turbidity, electrical conductivity EC, total alkalinity, total hardness, total coliform and fecal coliform have more influence on drinking water quality. DWQI results showed that the quality of drinking water supplied by the three DWTPs in Erbil City fallen within good level. Except various occasional periods where the quality was varying from good to fair. The quality of the drinking water supply never reached the level of marginal or poor over the time investigated. The applied hierarchical clustering analysis HCA classifies the drinking water dataset into three major clusters, reflecting diverse sources of the physicochemical and bacteriological parameter: natural, agriculture and urban discharges.