inckney Village Clerk Diane MacDonald remembers how she and her neighbors worried, how life changed, when they were told their good-tasting drinking water -- which sprang from long-established groundwater wells below Pinckney -- was no longer safe.

Some of her neighbors had drank the water all their lives. Suddenly, they were told not to drink it, not even to bathe in it. In order to take a shower, village residents from some 50 households packed up their towels and soap and headed for the Village's fire station.

Even though it looked clear, tasted clean and was refreshing, pollutants from two old gasoline stations and a bulk tank facility had seeped into the sand and gravel beneath Pinckney in Livingston County, an area rich with aquifers. Solvents flushed into a factory floor drain had corroded the bottom of a pipe, and the contaminants had traveled to the water supplies.

What happened to Pinckney, unfortunately has happened to scores of communities throughout Michigan, where 43 percent of residents depend on groundwater for their drinking supplies. While Michigan's groundwater supply is plentiful and good, it is constantly being threatened. To help meet this threat, the Groundwater Education in Michigan (GEM) program, funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, has undertaken an ambitious project to educate homeowners, government officials, businesses and schoolchildren on ways to protect this vital resource.

What we do above ground affects what happens to our water supplies that are stored underground and held by the earth like a giant sponge.

Groundwater can be contaminated from a variety of sources:

• The development of new homes, shopping malls and golf courses can also threaten groundwater reserves. That's because, in many instances, they replace natural vegetation and protective land cover. Water that once percolated into the ground, eventually to recharge drinking water aquifers and streams, now runs off rooftops and pavement and directly into streams and lakes. This runoff carries sediment, oil, pesticides, fertilizers and other pollutants.
• A single heavy rain can wash thousands of pounds of lead, zinc, cadmium and other toxic metals from city streets and parking lots into rivers and streams.
• Other sources of pollution include construction sites, erosion, discharges from improperly maintained septic tanks, leaching from landfills and hazardous waste sites, salts and chloride from road de-icing and water softeners.

In scenic Pinckney, the 1,600 residents never imagined they'd find themselves without potable drinking water. When the crisis hit, Diane MacDonald was one of the lucky ones. Her home was newer, and so was her well -- and she was not compelled to drink bottled water, delivered for several years to the affected homes by the company identified as one of the groundwater polluters.

"It wasn't just a scare. It was the real thing," said MacDonald. "It was all a big surprise that it could happen to us."

The drinking water problems started in 1986, and some residents used bottled water for years. Even now, clean-up of the contaminated site continues, as state officials spend millions of dollars to pump out the tainted groundwater, clean it with sophisticated equipment and technology, and send it back into the earth.

In the years since, the Huron River Watershed Council with funding from GEM grant money, has educated Pinckney residents, elected officials and businesses about groundwater protection. Watershed staffers visited area businesses, accompanied by friendly faces from the Village fire department, to point out ways to use, store and dispose of hazardous substances. An inventory was developed of potential trouble spots.