If you have to bug out, bug in, or even just hang out in the Superdome with the other hurricane survivors, you can go for 10 days or more without food. It will be unpleasant, you will feel ill, unhappy, and desperate. You will, however, live if you get a reliable supply of food within a few weeks of your TEOTWAWKI event.
Water, however, is a different story. It’s not just something you use to bathe, wash your car, or do the dishes. It is, literally, the elixir of life. You will die if you go four, maybe five days without it. Even if you are without it a few days you will begin to suffer potentially permanent ill effects.
When you prepare for disaster, civil disorder, or other TEOTWAWKI events, water should be at the top of your list of considerations in my opinion. Fortunately water is one of the most common things on Earth, right? Absolutely. You are right, water is everywhere. The problem with that observation, however, is that very little of it is consumable. About one percent of fresh water on Earth is potable, or about .007 percent of all water on Earth is potable. With that in mind, water for your family to drink becomes a much bigger issue. There are ways around this problem, though.
Americans are blessed with a water system that provides healthy and usually quite good tasting water for use of our citizens. It comes out of a convenient metal fixture in my sinks, my bathtubs, and my water hose. What happens if that water supply stops? The best answer for anyone would be a good long term solution, such as a well. With an aquifer beneath your property supplying a well with fresh water, you have the advantage of the Earth itself filtering your water. Unless you have dangerous metals contaminating that well, you will have access to fresh water for your family that will be both convenient and reliable. If this is your situation, you are indeed very lucky. The first thing you should do is ensure that you have the means to get to that water should the electrical grid fail you. I still remember the hand pump behind my grandparents house. They’d always save a little water to prime the well so that they could get as much as they needed from the ground. I used to think they had it rough. Now I know they had security.
Another method of securing water for your family long term is access to a stream or river. A lake will do just fine. There is, however, risk associated with water open to the environment that isn’t as much of an issue with well water. Contamination. Well water is, as mentioned, filtered by the Earth. Open water is contaminated with decaying animals, bacteria, animal and human waste, and potentially chemicals that will poison you as surely as if you sucked the mercury out of a thermometer.
A way to get around the contamination problem does exist. In fact, there are several ways. You can buy a pre-made filter, plenty of extra filter [element]s, and keep stocked up for a long term ability to filter your water of chemical and biological contaminants. You can also make your own filter, it’s not that hard. Activated charcoal and increasingly fine mesh filter media used inside a PVC pipe can do a pretty good job of cleaning water. No matter what you do as far as filtration goes, you should also boil your water. As can be seen with the current cholera outbreak in Haiti, microbial contamination is a huge threat in TEOTWAWKI situations. If the Haitians were all boiling their water, it would go a long way toward putting an end to the cholera outbreak. They are, however, due to their financial situation unprepared for the problems associated with the earthquake that devastated their country.
Boiling water takes fuel. A wood fire will do, maybe propane on your camp stove. However you do it, you must have a container to boil the water in that will stand up to repeat use as a boiling pot. Since you must use fuel anyway, I have a different suggestion that I use for my family. Distillation. I built a still, and I plan on building another. The one I built costs me eighty dollars. I plan to put aside a few hundred dollars soon to buy and build a larger still.
To start with I bought a thirty-six gallon aluminum pot from Sam’s Club. It is quite thick and sturdy, able to stand up to open flame or a burner. I have no idea of knowing which I would have to use, so my pot is the best I could find. The pot came with a nice thick lid as well. I bought a couple of C-clamps to hold the lid in place, preventing steam from escaping. Some still does, I am planning on adding a gasket to the lid to make a better seal.
The next step was to give that steam in the pot a place to go. I didn’t want to build a bomb, so I put a plumbing fitting through the lid. I drilled a hole of the proper size, and the correct fittings from the local home fix-it store. A hardware store will likely have all the plumbing fittings too. I’m not going to give out part numbers, if you’re a prepper you’re already smart enough to figure out how to use a gasket, select a plumbing item, and create a way for the steam to pass through the lid of the pot. I selected my fixture so that I could use garden hose gaskets as gaskets for my fitting. They are cheap, and heavy duty. You also get several in a bag. The next thing I did was attach a flexible faucet hose to the fitting on the lid. I’m talking about the braided steel hose that attaches the faucet fixture to the wall spigot. You’ll see why I selected a flexible hose in a minute. They have plastic hoses as well, but I paid a few more dollars to add the durability of braided steel. I then attached a fitting to the other end of the hose that would allow me to attach and remove a one half inch copper pipe to the steam pot. I cut a two foot section of pipe for this.
You can’t distill water if steam is the only thing coming out of the end pipe. You need a chiller pot. I bought a sixteen quart enameled stockpot as my chiller. Again, I put plumbing fixtures on the pot, but this time I put them through the wall of the pot, not the lid. I put one near the top, and one at the bottom. On the inside wall of the pot is a pressure fitting that allows you to press your condensation coil into it. That will create a tight seal with the copper tubing of your condensation coil. Your condensation coil is created by purchasing a coil of copper tubing that is flexible, and then creating a spiral from the top fitting to the bottom. Make sure that your spiral is angled down at all points, as water will not drain if it condenses into a ‘valley’ in the coil. If the water cannot drain, it will act as a plug and create back pressure in the steam pot. This increases the possibility that steam will escape instead of condense and flow out as pure water.
The outside attachments on the chiller pot are the same attachment you use on the end of the braided steel hose. Make sure you caulk the inside and outside of the fittings on the chiller pot liberally, you’ll need to make sure your water in that pot doesn’t leak out. That water will absorb the heat from the copper condensation tube, turning the steam from the steam pot back into water. On the bottom fitting, the one that the condensed and purified water comes out of, I put a six inch copper tube to allow for a bowl or pitcher to be used to collect the distilled water.
This design can be improved. For one thing, by the time I distilled a quart of water, the water in the chiller pot was steaming from the heat transferred to it. You’ll have to change the water in the chilling pot (which doesn’t need to be purified, just reasonably clear so as not to make the pot too nasty) for every quart otherwise too much steam will escape and not be saved as water. The next thing is that I believe the chiller pot needs to be bigger and also have another fixture at the bottom so you can drain the water from it without disassembling the still. Refilling it would then be a matter of just closing that valve and pouring more cold water into it. Make sure not to mix your distilled water and your chiller water, or you’ve just wasted all your effort. I also believe that a bigger chiller pot will allow you to use a longer condensation coil. The longer the coil, the less likely it is that it will get hot enough for steam to travel the entire length of it.
My current still design is nice in that you can put the chiller pot inside the steam pot, allow you to travel with just the one pot as far as space goes if need be. The half inch copper transfer tubes can be shortened as necessary to allow them to fit inside the steam pot as well. Once you use the still, you simply scrape any scum left in the bottom of the steam pot out to prepare it for the next use.
Distilled water isn’t that great tasting, but it works. Mine removed salt and food coloring from the water. Boiling is included in the process, of course, so all life in the water is killed. There is an urban myth that distilled water is bad because it leaches minerals from your body. This is wrong, the water is perfectly safe and any mineral imbalance that might give any weight to the leaching idea is fixed immediately as it mixes with the contents of your stomach. You did store food too, right? Even if you didn’t, there is no risk from distilled water. Distilled water is used in the saline solution that you are given in hospitals.
The great thing about a still is that it will clean very contaminated water. The downside is that you need fuel and a place to set it up that will be secure. If you don’t have that, you’re going to need short term water to get you by. That involves storage on hand prior to TEOTWAWKI.
My family stores water in portable six gallon water containers that we pick up locally to avoid shipping. Wal-Mart has containers that are free of BPA (bad chemicals) in the sporting goods section for ten dollars. When you compare that to fifty-five gallon drum storage, there are several benefits. The large drums are generally nearly a hundred dollars by the time you add in a hand pump to get the water out. Just try picking up a fifty-five gallon drum to pour out the water for dinner. After shipping the cost of a large drum can be well over one hundred dollars. The six gallon containers, at ten dollars each, give you sixty gallons for one hundred dollars. They are portable, you can pick them up to pour out what you need. They have handles that you can use to carry one with you if you need to do so. They’re still heavy, but you’re much more likely to carry one of them instead of a barrel.
We also have about six hundred bottles of water on hand. If we bug in, those will be available for any excursions we have to make, as well as for home use as we need. They’re very convenient, and can store for a good long time. Usually it’s less than four dollars for a pack of thirty two at the bulk stores. We also save our two liter bottles and fill them with water after they’re empty. They’re designed to last long term with liquid inside, and we stack them like you would stack wood. On their side stacked up about five high. You might be able to stack more, but I don’t want to put too much pressure on the bottom bottles and promote leaking lids. The last method of short term storage is your bathtubs and your toilets. The water in your toilet tank is perfectly good if it came from the water system prior to TEOTWAWKI. Once you have room in another container, siphon it out and store it safely. You can then use non-potable water to flush your toilets if you have a source. Remember the rule for that. Let yellow mellow, if it’s brown flush it down.
Remember that water needs should be at the top of your stores. If you have kids, buy some cocoa mix or fruit drink mix. They’ll snap that right up, mine do so now. So many of us are preparing for the worst, but if you don’t have safe water you may well be buying those goods for other survivors who find your stash after you die from dysentery or cholera. You owe it to yourself and to your kids, if you have them, to ensure you have a water supply that is safe.
Happy prepping!