Manganese water quality indicator

The following tables provide a detailed breakdown of the compliance of water well samples with health-based guidelines (Table 1) and aesthetic guidelines (Table 2). These results indicate that in general the water quality of domestic water wells in New Brunswick is very good. The most common water quality issues in New Brunswick are due to excessive iron and manganese in well water, which is attributable to the natural geology of the province. 

For this study, we consider four types of water non-impacted (arsenic below detection limit), low (greater than the detection limit and less than 10 pg/l As), moderate (10-100 p.g/1 As), and high (greater than 100 pg/1 As). Typical of water quality data, the data set is censored and as such, the concentrations reported for most constituents are not normally distributed (Gibbons, 1994). Because of this limitation, box plots (Fig. 6) are used to evaluate and compare the water quality results. The distributions of concentrations were compared for iron, sulfate, pH, alkalinity, nickel, zinc, manganese and specific conductance (SC). The box plots should be viewed with consideration of sample size, which is indicated on Fig. 6. 

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