Water For Emergencies

Water is extremely important to being comfortable during or even surviving an emergency. Most people can survive for at least a week with no food at all. If you don't have water you may be lucky to live a few days. Water should be an important part of your emergency preparedness. 


People often do not understand why water might be a problem during an emergency. They can just turn on the tap and water will come out, right?


Nope.


It is not that easy. Many disasters involve no water coming out of the faucets or bad water coming out that is not safe to drink. Earthquakes often break water lines and wreck wells and city water reservoirs or purification plants. Floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and tsunamis often cause contaminated water. Those are just a few of the highlights of why you want to have water stored for emergencies.


An alternative to storing water is to have a very good purifier to be able to clean up whatever water you can get. That one is dependent on being able to get any water to clean. Not all disasters will leave you that option. If you want to leave your options open, you could keep some water stored and have a filter system as backup.


If you intend to filter water you need to consider impurities and disease. Just running your water through progressively smaller layers of filters will work like a stream in nature and take out most of the dirty things from the water. Then you need to think about disease causing organisms, like parasites and germs. Boiling will kill most diseases and parasites, but that requires fuel that might be scarce.


You can buy filters that take care of both types of water cleaning problems, but the really good ones can be quite expensive. I used to have a very good one that had ceramic filtering elements with silver in them to kill any germs that were small enough to get through the pores in the ceramics. It worked on gravity. You simply poured water into the container and it went through the filter and into another container with a spigot for draining out clean water. I used it all the time because I lived in a city with very bad water. That was made in Switzerland, but the same type is also made in the United States now. I do not know whether it is made in other countries as well.


I plan to go into more detail about different emergency preparedness areas after I hit the highlights. 


Next post is for more about water for emergency preparedness.