STORAGE AND PURIFICATION
Regardless of what is going on around you, you won’t be able to survive for long without clean, potable water. In fact, after just 24 hours without water, your brain stops functioning properly, and within three days, your organs will start to fail. In less than a week, you’ll be dead. Water doesn’t just keep your tissues hydrated, it also:
Carries waste and toxins out of your body
Helps keep your body temperature normal and regular
Keeps your joints lubricated
Keeps your blood liquid so it can carry oxygen and nutrients throughout your body
Aids with digestion
Keeps your eyes lubricated and healthy
Keeps your brain functioning properly
In a nutshell, water keeps you alive and you have to have it.
Finding and Gathering Safe Drinking Water
One of the first steps to emergency preparedness is finding a viable source of water. Unfortunately, after certain disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, or floods, sources of water that were once safe to drink may no longer be, so you need to have backup plans.
Finding Viable Sources of Water Locally
If you had to name five sources of fresh water within a five-mile radius, would you be able to do it? It seems easy, but many people struggle with it because they simply don’t take the time to familiarize themselves with their surroundings. Just knowing where to find water in an emergency situation is going to give you an advantage over many of your peers, and it can be quite enjoyable, too!
Field trips are always fun and are a great way to take your family out and learn about your surrounding area. Make it fun. If you have kids, do a scavenger hunt or go camping. If you don’t, make it a hiking trip or picnic with friends or significant others. Make a map with distances marked, because five minutes in a car is actually quite a distance when you’re on foot. Some of the best sources for fresh water include:
Rivers
Streams
Retention ponds (Make sure it’s not a wastewater pond!)
Lakes
Springs
Natural ponds
Wells
It’s important to know the difference between fresh water, wastewater, brackish water, and salt water because only the freshwater is really useful as a water source. Wastewater is no good for drinking for obvious reasons, and brackish or salt water can actually kill you by dehydration because of the salt in it . . . although it may be okay for such things as flushing toilets.
Wells are actually great because they’re generally built over an underground stream or spring and are thus a self-replenishing source of water. As a matter of fact, it’s not a bad idea to have a well dug on your property, or make that something you look for when you’re searching properties.
Rainwater
Rainwater is another great source of potable water and can be captured in many different ways. Perhaps the easiest ways are to just use buckets or barrels, or to hang a tarp to capture it and then drain the tarp into your barrels. There are also capture systems that you can buy that actually purify water as it’s captured. As a matter of fact, you can use these systems for your home as a natural water source instead of depending upon your local water company to provide chemically treated water for a price.
Like all of your other supplies, rotate your rainwater supply so it stays fresh. Even if you don’t have a rainwater purification system to use the water in the house, it’s great to use outside for watering your plants, bathing, filling the pool, or doing outside chores such as washing windows.
Bottled Water
In addition to knowing where to find a ready supply of fresh water for long-term use, it’s a good idea to store bottled water as well. Many people store only enough for a few days or a week because of the amount of space it takes up. Plan for at least one gallon of water per person, per day, and that’s just for drinking and cooking purposes. If you’re going to plan for hygiene uses as well, double that to two gallons of water per person, per day. Here are some options that you have for storing water:
Commercially bottled water in personal-sized bottles
Commercially bottled water in gallon bottles or larger containers
Home-bottled tap water, purified
Home-bottled rainwater, purified
It’s fine to bottle water from the tap or from your home filtering system, but make sure that it’s purified before you store it so that bacteria can’t grow in it. Rotate your water stocks just like you rotate your foods. Use it naturally and replenish regularly.
Water Purification Methods
During an emergency event such as a hurricane, flood, earthquake, or tornado, even the purest sources of water may become unsafe to drink. The best way to ensure that your water is drinkable is to purify it yourself prior to drinking it, if it’s not in a bottle. Not only do you need to know how to do it, you need to teach each member of your family how to make water safe, too.
Mechanical Filtration
The water filters in refrigerators use mechanical filtration. This method involves running your water through filters such as sand, charcoal, ceramic, or silver to remove debris and physical contaminants.
If you’d like to make your own filtration system at home, you can do so fairly easily. Here’s what you’ll need:
2-liter soda bottle, cut in half
Coffee filter, cheesecloth, paper towel, or other cloth-type filtering material
½ cup sand
½ cup charcoal
1 cup gravel
Flip the top half of the soda bottle upside down into the bottom half of the bottle so that the mouth of the bottle is facing down like a funnel. Put the filter either inside the “funnel” part of the bottle or secure it with a rubber band or string on the outside of the spout. Place the charcoal inside first. Then place the sand on top of the charcoal followed by the gravel. Simply pour the dirty water over the gravel so that it filters down through the rocks, charcoal, and sand, and then drips into the bottom half of the bottle.
Add the water slowly so that it stays below the top of the filter. Otherwise the dirty water will run down the outside of the filter. Remember also that this method filters out only debris; it doesn’t kill pathogens or parasites, so you may want to use a chemical treatment after you
