ABSTRACT
This chapter contains three examples of groundwater flow through large net of fractures. The first and second examples concern its high capacity to transmit pressure or transport groundwater over exceptionally long distances. The third example exemplifies how pervious megafractures redistribute heat continually stored at very deep horizons around the periphery of residual reliefs giving rise to mild hot springs. In the early 1960s, at the start of the plant operations, some hauling activities generated some Zn contamination spots but rapidly alleviated. Regional rocks are low-grade metasiltstones immersed in a sericite-chlorite dark gray matrix. However, for the subvertical megafractures, mostly accountable for the groundwater advective transport of the dissolved metals at great depths and at a considerable distance from the industrial site, their “equivalent” anisotropic transmissivity was considered proportional to the average continuous apparent length revealed by regional photo analysis.
