Determination Of Sources Of Water Pollution

ABSTRACT: Water is one of the most important compounds that profoundly influence life. In spite of its enormousness, increasing the population of any country increases the demand for water supply and everything needed by man for survival. Satisfying these anthropogenic needs tend to change the originality of some of the existing natural resources of which water is of no exception. Once these water resources are polluted, its quality cannot be restored by minimizing the factors that contribute to the pollution. The most common source of pollution of water is from substances used in forestry, waste and agriculture such as insecticides, herbicides, fungicides etc, and aerosols from pharmaceuticals and personal care products. The study was conducted to possibly determine the sources of pollution of a dam, a pond and two point boreholes that were actively in use by the people of Appiakrom community in the Sekyere Central District in Ashanti region of Ghana. Physical observation of site condition and community-based response survey were used with laboratory work being the main instrument for analyzing the physiochemical state and bacterial content of the water. The study revealed that the dam that supplied the whole district with water had been polluted as a result of anthropogenic activities that were evitable. The rusty nature of the undrinkable borehole was attributed to the underground parent materials in the area where the borehole was constructed. The Ghana Water Com-pany Limited should therefore insist on the owners of the pond to resort to dug wells as their main source of water to the pond and block the channels constructed out of the dam to reduce the possibility of pollutants moving from the pond to the dam due to the pond-dam interface. Finally farmers around the bank of the dam should be entreated to practice zero fertilizer farming to avoid leaching of acid forming compounds into the dam.