| Emergency Drinking Water |
| During our everyday lives, most of us take drinking water for granted. But that can’t be the case following a major disaster, whether it is a storm, earthquake, or flood. In these situations, it’s crucial that you have an emergency drinking water supply on hand. While a person can survive several weeks without food, death will come within a few days without adequate drinking water. Having a supply of emergency drinking water in or near your home could save your life during an emergency. During emergencies, it’s not uncommon for the local water works to shut down, leaving you at the mercy of merchants who charge exorbitant prices for the bottled water they have in stock, or relying on government distribution of drinking water. Getting an "in house" (or close-to-the-house) emergency drinking water source would greatly improve your self-sufficiency potential and save a lot of time that would otherwise be spent hauling drinking water during a disaster – time which might be better spent working at producing food, helping rebuild your home, or any of a number of other important tasks. For those lucky few who have a nearby spring or creek from which drinking water can be diverted, creating an emergency drinking water supply is as easy as adding some plastic pipe (perhaps with an electric pump to help the water along its way) connecting the drinking water to your home. Another option for an emergency drinking water storage system is a cistern. This system consists of a large storage tank, which is fed by water running from the water gutters on your home. While this water is not always suitable for drinking water usage, it is ideal for non-drinking uses, such as watering small “survival gardens” or providing drinking water for your pets. If you have your own pump and water well, then you need to create a system that makes it possible to run the pump during an emergency. This might mean a gas-operated pump or a generator to run the electric motor powering the pump that's in place; if your budget is limited, then a hand pump that can be attached to the well head during a protracted electrical outage could be a life saver. A gas-powered pump can also be put to a number of other purposes that might be important during an emergency. One obvious use is in fighting fires; if you have a source of drinking water like a stream, lake, or swimming pool, a gas-operated water pump could enable you to fight a fire when the city water lines dropped or failed due to breaks in the line or heavy use by the fire department. If you purchase a pump capable of propelling liquids containing mud and sand (often known as "trash pumps"), you could also employ the pump as an emergency sump pump to remove water from a basement or other area during flooding. While you can't keep such work up indefinitely during a flood produced by a river or the like, if your problem is simply water run-off, backed up sewers, or the like, then having a pump that can be fired up to empty your basement and keep the water level from rising enough to damage anything you have in the basement would be a big plus. Of course if you use a pump to lift water out of a basement or other area, great care must be exercised to sterilize and clean the pump before again employing it to pump drinking water. If you are on a city or rural water supply line, then you might still consider creating an alternate supply of drinking water. Some people have connected a hand or motorized pump to their swimming pool, thereby creating a source of water that can be employed for washing clothing and running the plumbing or – if properly processed – for drinking water and food preparations. You should also avoid water sources that may contain contaminates or chemicals added to kill algae or other plants since such water sources might be poisonous when used as drinking water. For the rest of us that don’t have access to natural drinking water sources and are connected to a municipal or rural water system that could be seriously disrupted by a major disaster, it’s best to maintain an emergency drinking water supply of bottled water. In this situation, the first question is, how much drinking water do you need? Drinking water needs are fairly easy to figure, but you must bear in mind that you'll need more drinking water in hot weather or when doing strenuous work. In addition, remember that water will also be needed for cleanup, food preparation, and accidental loss of water due to spills, broken containers, and other unforeseen happenstance. Therefore, when storing emergency drinking water, always give yourself a bit extra. It's better to have too much drinking water than not enough drinking water. That said, plan on providing a gallon of water per person per day just for drinking in extremely hot weather. Cooking and bathing will call for even more water per person. And you should try to save a little extra drinking water in case you need to supply your neighbors or have relatives who've dropped in from out of state when a disaster occurs. How many days do you need to have drinking water for? The bare minimum is four to seven days of drinking water. But given the degree of damage that a riot, hurricane, or major earthquake might cause to a densely settled area, it's a good plan to have considerably more than this with a month's worth of drinking water seeming like a minimum that you should store. Home Page | FAQs | Glossary | Contact Us |