Drinking water in the vast Arctic Canadian territory of Nunavut is sourced from surface water lakes or rivers and transferred to man-made or natural reservoirs. The raw water is at a minimum treated by chlorination and distributed to customers either by trucks delivering to a water storage tank inside buildings or through a piped distribution system. The objective of this study was to characterize the chemical and microbial drinking water quality from source to tap in three hamlets (Coral Harbour, Pond Inlet and Pangnirtung-each has a population of <2000) on trucked service, and in Iqaluit (population ~6700), which uses a combination of trucked and piped water conveyance. Generally, the source and drinking water was of satisfactory microbial quality, containing Escherichia coli levels of <1 MPN/100 mL with a few exceptions, and selected pathogenic bacteria and parasites were below detection limits using quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) methods. Tap water in households receiving trucked water contained less than the recommended 0.2 mg/L of free chlorine, while piped drinking water in Iqaluit complied with Health Canada guidelines for residual chlorine (i.e. >0.2 mg/L free chlorine). Some buildings in the four communities contained manganese (Mn), copper (Cu), iron (Fe) and/or lead (Pb) concentrations above Health Canada guideline values for the aesthetic (Mn, Cu and Fe) and health (Pb) objectives. Corrosion of components of the drinking water distribution system (household storage tanks, premise plumbing) could be contributing to Pb, Cu and Fe levels, as the source water in three of the four communities had low alkalinity. The results point to the need for robust disinfection, which may include secondary disinfection or point-of-use disinfection, to prevent microbial risks in drinking water tanks in buildings and ultimately at the tap.
In the Canadian Arctic, it is common practice to discharge municipal wastewater into tundra wetlands. Antibiotic resistant bacteria and the antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) they contain can be present in municipal wastewater and there is a scarcity of knowledge on ARGs in wastewater in Arctic environments. This study was initiated on the fate of ARGs in tundra wetland ecosystems impacted by anthropogenic wastewater sources in Arctic communities. In the summer season of 2016, two wetlands were studied in the Inuit communities of Sanikiluaq and Naujaat in Nunavut, Canada. Genomic DNA was extracted from both soil and water during the spring freshet and late summer in the wetlands, and a suite of nine clinically relevant ARGs (sul1, sul2, mecA, vanA, qnrS, ermB, tetO, bla, bla), and an integron gene (int1) were analyzed using quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR). Hydrological and water quality measurements were conducted in conjunction with the microbiological sampling. Gene targets were consistently present in the wastewater, and throughout both wetlands, except for vanA and mecA. Concentrations of ARGs were greater during the spring freshet, due to short hydraulic retention times (<2 days), which coincided with decreased treatment performance. The environmental resistome in un-impacted wetlands had above detection limit concentrations of int1, sul1, sul2, bla in water in Naujaat, and sul1, qnrS and tetO in soil in Sanikiluaq. First-order rate constants were widely variable and specific to the gene target. ARGs were present in concentrations elevated above baseline reference sites in tundra wetlands influenced by municipal wastewater, and hydrological conditions had a large impact on their spatial distribution and levels.
With increasing development in northern regions comes the growing risk for present-day groundwater contamination (Macdonald et al., 2005;McKenzie et al., 2021;Poland et al., 2003), and ongoing permafrost thaw due to climate change may release previously sequestered chemical species (Vonk et al., 2019). Many communities in the Arctic and subarctic utilize landfills and wastewater lagoons that are not underlain by engineered seepage barrier materials (Al-Houri et al., 2009;Daley et al., 2018;McCarter et al., 2017), possibly under the assumption that these are underlain by sufficiently impermeable frozen ground. With
In the Canadian Arctic, the availability of sustainable drinking water supplies is threatened by pressures such as increasing populations, climate change, and the remote geographic nature of the communities. The objective of this study was to conduct a screening level vulnerability assessment of municipal drinking water supplies in the Canadian territory of Nunavut with consideration for climate change, population growth, and infrastructure changes. A hydrological analysis of primary drinking water supply watersheds was performed to evaluate the relative vulnerability level in 24 Nunavut communities. We used a water balance model to predict annual water yield from each watershed using historical and projected future climate data. Approximately 25% of the study communities were projected to experience high vulnerability to water shortages by 2070, defined as using greater than 40% of available water from their source watershed on an annual basis. A medium level of vulnerability (using 20% – 40% of annual available water) was determined for 8% of the study communities and a moderate level for 12% (using 10% – 20% of annual available water). A low vulnerability level to 2070 (using less than 10% of annual available water) was determined for 55% of the communities. The vulnerability level was primarily influenced by source watershed size. The results of this study could be used as a component of a proactive strategy to help address water security issues in Nunavut.
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).
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