Utilization of Agricultural Biomass Materials for Treatment of Minna Underground Water for Human Consumption

Abstract Minna, capital of Niger State, is a town located in central part of Nigeria which experiences acute water shortage during dry season of every year due to inadequate supply of treated water from State Water Board. This has made many low income citizens of the state to sink shallow wells that they can financially afford to source water for their daily needs. Despite low yields from these wells, the water had been found to be polluted with organic/inorganic matter and micro-organisms that make it unsuitable for human consumption as compared with world Health Organization guidelines on safe drinking water. In order to control the diseases that continuous consumption of this type of infected water might unconsciously been causing to people that drink it, this project developed an affordable water filtration plant using locally available materials that included the ash of biomass of rice husk wasted away after harvest of rice, sand and gravel as filtration media for its treatment. The plant was designed, constructed and test run with water sample sourced from 11 wells located in different parts of Minna. Physico-chemical tests on the treated water samples showed that the compositional characteristics including PH, turbidity, alkalinity, temperature, hardness and chloride ion contents that were above WHO acceptable values before treatment were all modified by treatment plant and brought to within WHO standard for safe drinking water. The micro-organic constituents of raw well water samples got reduced from the heavy presences of enterobacter, aerogen and Escherichia-coli bacteria to concentrations of Nill/70ml to Nill/100ml which was better and safer than or equa