Assessment of the quality of spring water with in Tororo municipality.

Abstract

Tororo municipality has a total number of II springs which supply over 40%, of the individuals with in the pre-urban area of the municipality. Some of these springs are shared by animals and are bushy this therefore makes them prone to contamination, this makes the individuals vulnerable to water related diseases such as typhoid and diarrhoea since they are rated among the first five common diseases, the aim or this study was to assess the drinking water quality of these sources, The turbidity, iron content, total dissolved solids, colour and chlorides of all the spring. wells within the municipality was below the standard permissible limits. The colour level, of water within the sampling points ranged from 10 to 65 with 4 springs above the standard permissible limit, according to hardness category (Hem 1970 the British Columbia Ground water Association, 2007), the spring water was under the category of hard and very harp of which only one well had hard water and the had very hard water. This might have resulted from weathering of limestone. sedimentary rock and. calcium bearing minerals largely facilitated by activities taking place-nearby such a mining. The Aluminium content of the springs ranged from 0.06 to 0.27.mg/l with only 4 springs above the standard permissible limit. According to the standard permissible limit all of the sprig sources are contaminated because the coliforms within the water source ranged from 10 CFUs/100ml to 89CFUs. The presence of microbial indicators in the spring wells might be due to soakage pits and latrines in the vicinity that had extended their influence on water qualities. From correlation, total coliform of spring wells hall no linear relationship with colour and turbidity. However, colour and turbidity, alkalinity and total hardness, turbidity and total dissolved solids, colour and total dissolved solids exhibited a strong positive correlation. Total hardness and chlorides showed a moderate negative correlation.