The 3rd of The Rule of 3’s is 3 Days – that’s how long a human can go without water.
Finding a short term water solution is a super easy and super cheap prep, but probably the most important for your happiness and survival. The World Health Organization reports that waterborne diseases account for 3.4 million deaths per year. According to UNICEF 6,000 children die every day from waterborne disease, and diarrhea causes 2.2 million of those deaths annually. We don’t hear about this stuff in the US because we have one of the best water systems on the planet. We literally take the stuff that goes down the toilet and turn it into potable (drinkable) water. Forget about gold, THAT is what I call ALCHEMY.
The Gear
Here is the gear you will need:
- Sawyer Water Filter. This is the industry standard. It is only $20, you can find them at your local big box retailer, and it filters 100,000 gallons of water (that is more than six typical residential swimming pools). Yes, there are filters that cost more and have the benefit of filtering viruses and bacteria. For price, ease of use, quantity of water, this is the best cost to benefit solution. I keep one in each of our Bug Out Bags.
- Water purifying tablets. The cost is about $9 and it only treats 25 quarts. I don’t recommend these.
- Budget Pro Tip: Small bottle of bleach. The tablets are expensive, and I don’t like unitaskers. I have a 3 oz. bottle that you would use for shampoo or conditioner that I use for bleach. I picked mine up in the travel size toiletry section of Wal-Mart.
Pre-Filter Water
I have a shemgah that I would place over the mouth of the water bag or bottle to filter out debris prior to the water going in the bottle. If I am getting the water out of a clear stream or swimming pool, then I wouldn’t bother with this step.
Run Water Through Water Filter
Push our use gravity to get the water through the water filter into another bottle. The Sawyer water filter comes with a bladder and flexible straw that aids in this task.
Purify Water
The water filter does not remove viruses. We now need to purify the water. Place two water purification tablets into one quart of water and wait 30 minutes.
Or, use bleach as I do. I carry a repurposed aluminum 1.75 ml vodka bottle. I add five drops of bleach, shake it up and let it sit for 30 minutes to kill the viruses that may be in the water. Your water should have a slight chlorine or bleach odor. If you don’t have that odor, put the same number of drops in and wait another 15 minutes. If you can smell the chlorine, your water is safe.
Caution: Bleach has a shelf life. You don’t know without testing, but I use the rule of thumb that the half-life of bleach is about one year. If I am one year into a TEOTWAWKI situation and run across a bottle of bleach, I will just smell it. If it smells like chlorine, it still has potency. I would simply use twice as much as I normally would.
No Water Bottle, No Filter, No Tablets, No Bleach? No Problem!
You can walk along any road or go to any park or walk down any stream or creek and find a plastic bottle.
Pre-filter the water going into the bottle. If you happen to be naked at the time, use the decanting method used in wine making. Let the debris in one bottle settle to the bottom. Gently pour the water into a second bottle careful to let the debris remain in the first bottle. This will remove most of the solids.
Return to your camp. Make a fire. Boil the water.
The point of the gear and steps above is to avoid the hassle of having to boil water. Boiling water requires fuel of some type. That very well may be your biggest challenge. Boiling water requires a significant amount of energy. You may be in a situation where you don’t want to build a fire because it might expose you to potential raiders or opportunity seekers. Water filters and purification are essential for these situations.
Cheapest prep for water is to fill empty soda bottles that have been thoroughly cleaned with tap water. Store them in a cool dark place and you’ve got “free” water for an emergency.
For folks with a bigger budget consider water filters that also purify the water by removing bacteria and viruses in one step. I’m partial to the Black Berkey elements, but the higher end of the Lifestraw family of products do this too.
But even if you have the best filters available, it’s still a good idea to store water since in some emergencies you won’t be able to go outside to gather more water. Weather, radiological, biological, etc might force you to shelter in place and it’s critical to have to enough water so you can wait until it’s safer to go out.
That was my first prep ever; 2L bottles with water. I came across the first bottles yesterday, tucked under the basement steps. They’d gone dry. I know they lasted several years (I’d checked on them before), but the water will escape those bottles a molecule at a time over the years. Just so folks know.
Good point about the foods expiring once opened. That’s a problem we found when researching what was really in a lot of the 3 or 6 month bucket products. They had these nifty envelopes, just add hot water — but they were 10 servings to the pouch sometimes! Great if you’re feeding a big family; lots of waste or food poisoning risk if you’re trying to feed one or two people.
I wouldn’t be surprised if your 2L bottles sprung a pinhole leak. Happened all the time to the 1 gallon bottles of water I first bought to be prepared…so I stopped buying them and went with more substantial 5 gallon opaque water jugs. Now that I’m getting older, I’m thinking 2 or 3 gallon jugs designed for LTS might be smarter since it’s getting harder to move 5 gallons at once. But for a short term cheap solution, 2L bottles are hard to beat. Use the savings to save up for the more long term containers. 🙂
And while I have enough food stored in case family makes it to my location, I’m really just planning on feeding my wife and myself. To extend the FD food shelf life, I have LOTs of ziplock freezer bags and silica gel packs. Any pouch of food that is too big for us to use up in one meal gets the excess dumped into a ziplock bag with a silica gel desiccant pack. After we finish the bag, I can recharge the silica gel pack in my Sun Oven for the next batch of “leftovers.” #10 cans with good lids I toss 2 of the desiccant packs in and skip the ziplock bag.
Oh, if you have a solar oven of any kind, you can cook enough for multiple meals safely at once by keeping the food hot all day. As long as the temperature doesn’t drop below the FDA recommended temp for whatever food it is, then bacteria can’t multiply to cause trouble. So when I’m using up my mid-term supplies of canned goods to make casseroles, even if I’m just feeding 2 people I can make lunch and dinner in a single pot as long as the sun stays out the whole day. Without a solar oven it’s not practical as you use up a lot of fuel holding the temperature, but with a solar oven the fuel is free and abundant for most folks.