Water potentiality and quality decay of carbonate aquifers of Monti Picentini Regional Park (Southern Italy)

The underground aquifers present in the carbonate massifs of the Monti Picentini Regional Park, captured for various uses (drinking, irrigation and industrial) constitute a fundamental resource to which the Campania, Puglia and Basilicata regions owe a large part of their development. The importance of these deep aquifers is even more evident if we consider that practically all the large aqueducts in southern Italy are fed by them. In particular, the Acquedotto Pugliese S.p.a represents the water resource coming from different resources such us springs located in Campania, artificial reservoirs thanks to potabilizers that make it of excellent quality and extraction from the deep aquifer through wells. This system of large adduction, among the longest in the world (about 5,000 km), ensures the supply of drinking water. The aqueduct of Acqua Bene Comune Napoli S.p.a.  serves over 2,000,000 citizens directly (city of Naples) or indirectly (sub-distributor municipalities) for approximately 295,000 users and with around 200 km of water supply pipeline. And finally, the company Alto Calore Servizi S.p.A. manages the collection, adduction and distribution of drinking water for 125 municipalities in the provinces of Avellino and Benevento, as well as sewerage and purification services for a population of approximately 450,000 inhabitants (approximately 213,500 users). The articulated hydrogeological structure of the territory and the multiplicity of agencies operating and interfering in the management of water resources, necessarily require a well embedded, short and long term planning of the use of groundwater. Considering that the planning must be based on the real potentialities of the aquifers and on the principle of sustainability of the resource, it must facilitate, at interregional level, the processes of interchangeability between the various network systems and guarantee quality and quantity of the resource for multiple socio-economic needs of the users. Moreover, the pollution of these water sources is increasingly manifesting itself as controls become more systematic and comprehensive. This is due to the high number of residential and industrial settlements in the study areas, the massive presence of livestock farms, intensive agriculture, the failure to complete the sewerage networks and therefore the high number of uncollected discharges, the failure to reclaim polluted land. It has been ascertained, in particular, in large areas of the high plain or even of alluvial origin, a significant increase in the concentration of nitrates, for example in the plain of Dragone in the countryside of Volturara Irpina (AV) the values often exceed the limit of 50 mg/l imposed by Italian legal limits for drinking water and are almost constantly over the threshold of attention. Even more alarming is the finding of heavy metals (iron, lead, copper, cadmium, aluminium, trivalent and hexavalent chromium) in some alluvial aquifers (Valley of Solofrana Torrent). In the present work, through the integrated analysis of geological, geochemical and hydrogeological data, found over the last thirty years, we analyzed the causes and relationships that link the factors of propagation of pollutants in the different groundwater bodies.