Ditch water… that’s what we in Missouri call any stagnant pool of water sitting around in ditches and small streams.
Generally, ditch water is teeming with life, with insects, frogs, mosquito & other larvae, all kinds of interesting biological stuff, feeding off the nutrients that have run into the ditch from nearby pastures full of cow, horse and deer poop.
The purpose of this article is to encourage you to start wrapping your mind around the fact that ditch water is a prepping resource, and that prepping to use ditch water should be near the top of everybody’s prepping “to do” list.
This small stream is located WAY out in the country, but even still it has a fine sheen of heaven-only-,knows-what on it.
You Want Me To Drink Ditch Water? Are You SERIOUS?
Let’s be serious for a minute, NOBODY wants to drink ditch water as a first choice.
I’ve seen perfectly clean looking fast running ice cold mountain streams that I want to drink straight out of (but DON’T, even they are not often safe!)… but no matter how thirsty I have been, I’ve never wanted to down quart of ditch water right out of the stream.
Having said that, even ditch water is a valuable prepping resource as long as you have the proper purification and filtration devices in your preps.
We have several articles here on 3BY that talk about purification methods
Let’s review some of them.
Distillation: The Most Effective Water Purification For Preppers
In this article, Spice says: “There are lots of ways to purify water: distillation, filtration, reverse osmosis, chemical treatments, ultraviolet light. No one does a perfect job; all have their strengths and weaknesses. I’ll get into that more in a later post. I settled on distillation for my ‘make water that’s contaminated with a wide variety of nasty things drinkable’ choice for two main reasons:
Distillation handles a wider array of contaminants than most methods. Everything infective, including bacteria, protists, viruses, and even prions is either killed or left behind in the dregs.
Distillation removes most organic chemical contaminants, such as residues of most oils and solvents, gasoline, pesticides, herbicides. It also removes salts, so it gets rid of dangerous heavy metals including lead and mercury. That’s most of the stuff I’d worry about being in the water. (1) I’d be confidant in drinking distilled water from my pond, or even a random ditch.”
Water Filters are a way that we use, A LOT.
In fact we did a podcast not too long ago talking about them:
This is, by far, a better way than gathering ditch water… but even tap water is often best when filtered.
Spice also talks about water filters in this article:
She states: “One trick seriously lightened our load each day hiking in the wild without reducing our safety. We assessed what *reliable* water sources were along the way and carried enough to get there, plus some reserve, but not enough for the whole day’s walk. Each of us had a filtering water bottle that we used freely. Every ounce counts when you’re hoofing it, but water’s critical; this approach was a good compromise.”
Boiling – Easy, Cheap And Very Effective For MOST Ditch Water contaminations
By far our favorite way to boil water in the field (and at home, without power) is the Kelly Kettle. Again, rather than re-invent the wheel, here’s an article about the Kelly Kettle. Spice spills the beans on how it works; give it a read if you haven’t already.
The Importance Of Understanding ALL potential water sources
Water is one thing that we can’t live without. It’s critical. Without water, we die fast.
The thing is, we don’t just need water we need CLEAN water, POTABLE water, water that isn’t full of things that will make us sick.
The first priority is to know where to find the water, though… we can worry about cleaning it up after we find it.
We recommend doing a THOROUGH search of your neighborhood and a complete inventory of your water collection assets. Know where the ditches are. Learn where the low spots are. Know every stream, every draw.
In your own supplies, have plenty of containers that can catch and carry water. These can be as simple as a kiddie pool that you can place under a house downspout to catch many, many gallons of water after a rain. That water would need much less cleaning up than ditch water.
When water is scarce, it’s actually something people fight over.
When Ditch Water Is All You Have – A Historical Example
Entire battles during the United States Civil War were fought over ditch water. One such battle was Perryville, where two armies fought over the possession of a couple of turbid springs and some puddles of water.
In this article on the American Battlefield Trust website, historian Ken Noe states:
“In the autumn of 1862, the upper south west of the Appalachians and Midwest were locked in the worst drought in memory. So severe was the drought that when they arrived in Louisville, some of Buell’s Hoosiers just kept walking, across the Ohio River toward home. Indeed both armies had marched north into Kentucky absolutely desperate for water, and as a result the men were both dehydrated and sick due to the microbes they had ingested by drinking anything wet. Good water was a prize. On October 7, when Bragg directed Polk to stop and eliminate the pursuing Federal threat, he reunited his force in Perryville, taking tactical advantage of the hills west of town but also guarding a series of springs as well as the puddles in the bed of the Chaplin River.”
Yes, we understand that these two armies were already fighting, but still, fights about water resources are quite common and often become deadly.
Plan Now
Like everything else, the time to plan for ditch water collection is now. Hopefully you will never need your ditch water preps, but if you do… you REALLY will need them.
Another thing to think about is that you’ll want two sets of water containers: One for collection from the source, one for the purified water.