Treatment of Well Water Contaminated with Septic Tank Effluent Using a Modified Compacted Sand Filter

The flood that occurred in the month of August 2018 had brought severe damages all over Kerala. The major problem after the flooding was the contamination of well water with septic waste. This problem created a situation where proper drinking water was not available to the victims. A similar situation was faced by the residents of Velam Panchayath of Kozhikode district, where the well water was contaminated using septic tank effluent. Disinfection using bleaching powder was the only method adopted by the local authorities to make the well water potable. Since the septic waste contains toxic content and affects the human life significantly when consumed, an efficient and economic method of well water treatment is very necessary. The well water should be treated effectively after it is pumped into the overhead tank and then used for domestic purposes. This requires the designing of a filter in which the water gets purified in stages. The purified water coming out of the filter should be tested and made sure for drinking. The aim of this paper is to make a keen attention towards this problem and to implement some control measures to minimize this problem to certain extent by fabricating a Modified Drawer Compacted Sand Filter (MDCSF). This model consists of different drawers each filled with gravel, sand, activated charcoal, and silver-impregnated sand. Although the conventional drawer compacted sand filter has been used in the treatment of contaminated water, in this paper, a modification is made to the existing design by the introduction of forced aeration, using a silver-impregnated sand layer and an activated charcoal layer.