Water is critical to a diaster. The old saw is 3 days without water before you die. Obviously there's going to be some variance to that but apparently it's pretty close. Without water your body starts to shut down, it can't filter the toxins from your blood and urine, these build up and you die.
It's pretty simple and pretty ugly.
The recommended guideline is 2 to 4 quarts of water (or fluids) a day depending on activity.
That averages out to about 5 gallons a week. 250 gallons a year. Per person. And that doesn't count for cooking, meal prep/cleanup or bathing.
How much water do you have in your house right now? The answer may surprise you. You probably have 30-50 gallons in your hot water tank right now. Another several gallons locked up in your pipes. More in the tanks of your toilets. All clean and potable (i.e. drinkable).
One of the things we'd thought to depend on is the 20,000 gallons in our pool. Apparently that's not the best idea. Unless the temperatures are such that it impedes wildlife growth at the microscopic level then as soon as those pumps stop circulating chlorine through the water, nature's going to start to take over your pool and turn it into a swamp.
That's not to say you can't treat that water and make it drinkable but you have to have the means to do so handy. There's also the problem of the water reducing due to evaporation which concentrates the minerals and other non-watery things in it over time. Just like reducing a good sauce for dinner, your swimming pool is constantly being reduced over time that it's used making it harder and harder over time.
Of course if you have enough warning you could pump it empty and refill it while the water is still flowing. But are you going to have enough warning? Probably. But definitely? No.
So our new plan is to start stock piling flats of water bottles. Why bottles? Because it's cheaper per gallon than obtaining water drums for us and almost as important it's significantly less obvious as to what they're for -
"Why do you have so much water?"
"We got it for half price?"
We're going for the low key, bug in not out approach to our preparations. Once we've arranged for our own needs for a year to 18 months then we'll start our preps to be able to bring in others who refuse to prep or for some reason lose theirs in any situation.
The down side is 55 gallons of water in a water barrel takes up less space than the same 55 gallons of water stored in water bottles.
The up side is you can't lose 55 gallons of water due to contamination. A box of water bottles is significantly more moveable than the 450 lb water barrel.
With every silver lining is a dark cloud.
To supplement our growing stacks of water bottles we're going to get rain barrels and put them on our down spouts, for now just to provide water during the dry months for the gardens and lawns.
But in a disaster situation, those rain barrels combined with several tarps and some scrap lunber will become giant rain catchers storing pretty pure and clean water that we'll use to refill our water bottles from and drink first.
FYI, if you're considering using unscented chlorox (8 drops per gallon, sniff after half an hour and if it doesn't smell like chlorine, add another 8 drops, still no chlorine smell discard the water) to purify your water, maybe have a small vial in your GOOD bag (Get Out Of Dodge), well chlorox has a shelf life of around 6 months. Make sure you rotate that stuff frequently. A better alternative, at least a longer shelf life one is the chlorine powder you shock swimming pools with.
Also if you're going to use tincture of iodine or iodine tablets to purify your water then apparently a little vitamin C added to it afterwards will get rid of the iodine flavor. I wish I'd of known that as a kid when we went out scouting because those iodine tablets made for some seriously foul tasting water.
There are a number of personal water purifiers made for hikers that we're going to be looking at and probably buying one or two to stash for diasters. They can turn some very iffy water into crystal clear drinkable water.
You can also use a solar oven to pasturize water (to be safe bring it to 150F for several minutes). You can also simply use a black painted plastic bottle left in the sun and you can easily (ahead of time prior to a crisis) make a simple pasturization tester.
If you have fuel to burn, pun intended, you can also set up a moonshine still and distil your water, what you get out of it should be potable. Depending on the contaminants of course.
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