Lawyers for an individual and a business recently brought the power of the class-action suit to Maine in a lawsuit that makes so many serious charges against the origin and quality of Poland Spring water it is amazing the major market share of the bottled-water-consuming public isn’t gagging. It likely will be Maine’s best chance to watch this portion of the legal system at work and equally a chance for its congressional delegation to learn about the tort-reform bills before them.

A legal team filing complaints for Michelle Savalle, a Connecticut resident, and SDB Trucking, says Poland Spring draws its water not from “deep in the Maine woods” as it says but from a site 30 miles away from the original Poland Spring and under a parking lot or near a former dump. And that’s not spring water that it draws but something lesser – groundwater or maybe surface water in one case, says the suit.

Poland Spring representatives are eager to answer these charges, refute the parking lot and dump stories, explain why federal rules have them using bore holes, describe the steps they take to ensure the water is safe and show how their water meets Food and Drug Administration standards for safety and the accuracy of its label. They’re also willing to offer a few observations about mistakes they see in the charges made since arbitration meetings began last February. Mistakes like a contaminated water sample they say turned out to be from a competitor or an accusation that surface water was being bottled and sold when it was actually being used to water a nearby golf course. Defending itself fully, a representative estimates, will cost the company $30 million in legal and public-relations fees.

Whether water is still spring water if it comes from a spring but is pumped rather than allowed to rise on its own to the surface is a question for a court to decide after conferring with federal definitions. For its part, the FDA in 1995 concluded that ‘”[S]pring water’ is now defined as water collected as it flows naturally to the surface, or when pumped through a bore hole from the spring source.”

Poland Spring says this case is an example of the growing perversion of class-action suits, and what might interest the public most is the harm being suggested in the suit – that people paid a few cents more for Poland Spring water because it says “spring water” on the label and so they were potentially deceived. And who knows, perhaps some people really did believe the water they were drinking had been ladled into bottles by a group of antiseptically clean Mainers standing around a mountain spring. They would surely be surprised to discover that Poland Spring uses machinery in its processes and some of the water is not actually bottled until it gets to Massachusetts.

The mental anguish alone in such a discovery would be worth countless treasure to someone.