Post-earthquake heavy metal contamination of well waters in Hatay Province, Türkiye: source apportionment, human health risk and a debris-to-groundwater metal transfer framework.

The February 6, 2023 Kahramanmaras earthquakes (moment magnitude 7.7 and 7.6) devastated Hatay Province and generated building debris whose dumping near settlements and farmland may mobilize trace metals into shallow drinking-water aquifers. Thirty-three distinct wells in six Hatay districts were sampled in June 2024 and analyzed for fourteen elements by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry at the Central Laboratory of Iskenderun Technical University. Contamination indices, principal component analysis and hierarchical clustering were combined with a US Environmental Protection Agency ingestion and dermal assessment and a one-dimensional Monte Carlo simulation. Most elements met drinking-water limits, but iron and chromium exceeded the Turkish TS 266 guideline in 14 and 9 of 33 wells. Multivariate analysis separated a geogenic chromium-lithium-calcium-nickel association (Iskenderun-Arsuz, ophiolitic bedrock) from an anthropogenic iron-manganese-lead association (Hassa-Kirikhan) consistent with debris influence. The heavy metal pollution index remained below 100, yet the total hazard index exceeded unity for children in 18 samples and carcinogenic risk exceeded 1 × 10-4 in most samples, dominated by chromium. The highest hazard index was in geogenic Region 3, not in the debris-proximal wells. Guideline compliance for most metals does not imply the absence of pathway-specific, chromium-dominated risk. These conservative screening results call for chromium speciation and continuous monitoring and are placed in a conceptual Debris-to-Groundwater Metal Transfer (DGMT) framework.