The mediterranean’s karst basin waters is the topic of this research paper. The aim of the research is to help protect the karst underground waters through wastewater management of the basin’s area.
The main difficulty for our research was a shortage of knowledge in the identification of the karst’s hydrological system, such as in the case of a researched system where the system’s inlet and outlet are not completely known and the whole system is only partially explained from hydrogeological and hydrological aspects. For the research spot we chose a particular karst basin. Municipial wastewaters are discharged into the basin without any purification and, after being held in the underground, they appear at the spring that supplies water for the biggest lake in the Balkans.
Correlation data between low water and the characteristics of the basin (i.e. hydrological balance analysis data of specific capacity) do not exist. A series of hydro-chemical measurements at low water were undertaken in parallel at the inlet and the outlet in order to determine this correlation by an input-output balancing of pollutants’ load calculating their mass flow.
The hold time of pollutants in the underground karst water was determined by correlating the particular water quality indexes. Hold time amounts to 55 to 78 hours, depending primarily on the water ingredient features.