No abstract

Due to industrialization, there is enormous amount of heavy metals been released from anthropogenic sources into the environment. Heavy metals are considered as one of the main sources of environmental pollution since they have significant effect on the ecological quality and water in particular. These pollutants are hazardous to consumers of water that have significant quantity of these heavy metals. The population most exposed to cement polluted water includes workers in cement factories, families of workers living in Staff houses of factories like in Obajana and other neighborhood habitations. The Obajana cement factory consists of cement kilns/coolers with clinkers. The kilns are equipped with pre-heaters and Electro-Static Precipitators (ESP). The facility has raw mills, crushing operations, cement mills that are potential source of pollutants into the water bodies. Storage silos, conveyors, vehicular travel, and other unquantified fugitive source of water contamination exist in the factory. Monitoring the contamination of water with respect to heavy metals is of interest due to their influence on humans, animals and to some extent plants. A good approach to estimate how much of the water is impacted is by using the heavy metal pollution index and metal index for metal concentrations above the control points in water bodies around Obajana cement.