Rapid salinization of a karst aquifer after a typhoon-generated storm surge: Hydraulics, geochemistry, and community impact

Abstract:

Super Typhoon (STY) Haiyan made landfall in the Philippines with sustained winds of 315 kph producing a 7+ meter storm surge that inundated parts of Leyte and Samar; >8000 died, > 10⁶ homes were destroyed, and thousands of people are still missing. The surge reached 1 km inland and resulted in widespread seawater (SW) contamination of groundwater (GW) resources critical for coastal villages.

We conducted field-work in a village of ~2200 residents, inundated by a 5-6 m surge, 2 months and again 8 months after STY Haiyan. The 330+ shallow tube wells (STWs) had been drilled through beach sand into karstic reef carbonates to 5-20m below the water table (WT). Residents reported their STWs salinized immediately after the storm, even the deepest wells, and the only source of fresh water was a karst spring 1 km from the village. 2 months after the storm GW salinity was up to 18% SW. Electrical Resistivity Tomography (ERT) was used to image salt distribution in the surficial aquifer alongside the developed village. ERT detected an electrically conductive layer ~1m below the WT, and water sampling confirmed that this was due to infiltrated seawater. Variable-density flow and transport models corroborate the ER tomograms and show that the salt is infiltrating through the aquifer and slowly flushing to the ocean.

We hypothesize that SW rapidly infiltrated the ~2m sandy unsaturated zone and contaminated the shallow GW over a wide area. This salt layer is slowly sinking and flushing toward the ocean, and flow models show that it might be several years to flush the system. Results from a second ERT survey 6 months later show little change in the ER field, consistent with model predictions. But karst features and the STWs themselves served as preferential paths into the aquifer for SW injection to the deeper zone under the 6m surge potential, salinizing deep wells ahead of the advancing shallow SW layer. These wells have seen substantial decrease in salinity over 6 months, as much as 75%, with many approaching acceptable drinking water criteria (TDS<600ppm, WHO). We hypothesize that the deep-injected SW is being quickly flushed out by the coastward flow of fresh GW, enhanced by primary and secondary porosity in the carbonate aquifer. It is unclear however if the slowly sinking shallow layer of salt will contaminate STWs in the future.