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One of the reasons that I love watching movies and reading books, particularly those of the apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic variety, is because I occasionally learn a little tid-bit of useful knowledge that may one day benefit me.

One of my favorite movies and novels of this genre is “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy. While it is a fantastically bleak and powerful work, it still provided me a teaching moment that has been invaluable. In one of the opening scenes of the movie, we see that something dire has happened. Though we are never told what it is, we assume that it is either the precursor to, or is the extinction event itself, that drives the plot of this movie. The dad, whose name we are never told, immediately fills any basin in the house with water. He stops up the sinks and tubs. He fills any and all containers with water.

Additionally, we learn that he keeps his family inside his home, blocks windows, locks doors, but most importantly, keeps an extremely low profile in order to avoid any attention from the outside. We aren’t told if he, his wife, and his child stay inside 100% of the time, but we do know that the wife is slowly driven crazy with such a meager existence. We also learn that it is understood that life outside is death, for whatever reason, as she eventually departs and is never seen again.

What I find interesting is the relationship between the man’s actions early in the movie and his ability to outlast most everyone else. It’s obvious that his ability to avoid confrontation as well as make quick decisions provided great dividends in the future. Simply said, his willingness to stay bunkered down in his house, despite being well-equipped, served him greatly. While there may have been many other ancillary reasons, it can be safely assumed that riding out the storm was the most important and intelligent thing he could have done. Yet, without the proper resources, it would have led to death just as the outside world also promised. However, he was able to take stock of what he had, maximize it, and realize that he didn’t have to survive forever on these items. He just had to survive everyone else.

How was he able to do this when it was obvious that he hadn’t taken any great pains to prepare, as we have so discussed? How would I be able to apply this to my own situation, should the circumstances of this movie arrive at my doorstep? Going back to the single action that I identified earlier. He immediately stopped what he was doing and maximized the single most important resource he would need to survive and outlast. He stockpiled water.

Ever since I saw this movie, almost a decade ago, that one moment has stuck with me. This was before I even considered myself a casual prepper. I saw what he did, and I applied it to my checklist of things to do in the event of any emergency. To be fair, I had some experience with this exact problem back when I was a teenager. My area was devastated by a large F4 tornado that went right through my homestead. We lived on top of a hill surrounded by woodland. The downed trees trapped us on top of the mountain for several weeks. It became evident what resource was truly precious after about 3 days. Sure, we were down to eating things for meals that we would never have normally considered “dinner”– potted meat and canned tomatoes, for instance. Still, we were fed. What we didn’t have was water. See, living on top of a hill, we had a booster pump to supply water to us. With no electricity, we had no water. It took two days to drink all the sodas and juices. After two days of profuse sweating and hard work, it was hard to be around each other due to a lack of hygiene. The hard work and sweating was affecting the hydration of our bodies without pure water around. That isn’t to say we were in any danger of dying or anything. We weren’t. We had friends come help us after a day or two, but it has always stuck with me how quickly the water was gone, how precious it is, and just how much a human needs it to function.

It doesn’t take much time in researching other common natural and unnatural disasters to see what is the number one supply brought in by aid programs. Additionally, after disasters, the most common cause of sickness and death (other than trauma) is diseases through contaminated water supplies or dehydration itself. According to some quick research, the human man needs around three liters a day just to function. A woman needs a little less at 2.2 liters. As everyone knows, it only takes about 48 hours to die of dehydration, and that doesn’t cover the extra needed by people under physical duress. Additionally, water is needed for more than drinking. It’s needed for waste control, hygiene, and other things. It doesn’t take a genius to do some simple math to come up with the needs for your family on a day or month basis. For my family of five , which includes my wife, me, and three children, let’s say we need 12 liters or a little over 3 gallons a dayor around 90 gallons a month;ut 100 is a nice round number, so let’s use that number instead. We need 100 gallons a month for consumption alone. Additionally, I started thinking about how much time a family might need to buy themselves, hunkered down, to wait it out. As we have seen aftermany disasters, researchers’ numbers suggest that when supplies dry up, there is a high death rate right at 30 days. That number sounds good to me. Let’s go with it. We want to stay bunkered for 30 days in typical urban America. Our critical resource is water, so we need a minimum of 100 gallons for consumption alone. 

With that in mind, I started wondering about all the different ways that you could meet this demand. Keep in mind that I am considering only people living in urban areas where you have people living next door and across the street. You don’t have a water supply such as a stream or river that you can easily get to, and if you could, you wouldn’t because you don’t want to expose yourself to the outside. So, I thought of several ways to bunker up and meet your water quota. You could store it last minute using available containers. You could buy a supply of water. You could source water from the rain or try recovering the water with a “closed loop” approach. Immediately, I (and I know you) identify potential problems with each of these solutions. All you smart people are already thinking, “You will need a combination of these”. Well, for those that aren’t so savvy, let’s talk it out.

Storing Water from the Tap in Available Basins

Ironically, I was in the shower the other day when this topic came up. I called my wife into the bathroom and asked her how much water we could possibly have on hand, in the event of an emergency. Make the assumption that we wanted to turn the lights off, lock the doors, and pretend no one was home in order to avoid any conflict. What was our capacity? What would we have on hand? How long would that buy us. Lastly, how would that compare to the people around us, who ultimately may become the most dangerous of adversaries. Now, I understand that your neighbors that you have known for 10 years aren’t going to turn into crazies over night. Nor do I believe in zombies. However, let’s make the assumption that whatever is outside is bad, and you would prefer to stay indoors at all times. So, we added it up quickly:

• We have two bath tubs, each able to hold approx 30 gallons; that is 60 gallons,
• We have three sinks, one of them a double sink. Each holds an average of one gallon; so, let’s assume that is four gallons,
• Around the house, we have several pots and pans, buckets, coolers, water coolers, and other containers. If I were to use these, I would guess I could have another 50 gallons, and
• I have 2.5 cases of bottled water; each case contains 24 bottles that hold about 0.125 gallons. Let’s round that to 7.5 gallons of water

That gives us a total of 120 gallons or 450 liters, give or take. So, in an absolute best case situation (no losses do to leakage, evaporation, or use for other purposes, such as cleaning or sanitation), my family of 5 could stay indoors for 37 days. Let that sink in. A little over a month on your internal supplies alone. Of course, that’s assuming that you jumped on the water- saving effort immediately, had containers, and had some stock of bottled water. 

Now, I know many of you are saying that this is an over simplified example, and you would be correct. I will address some of the holes in my logic, but ultimately that 37 day estimate is fairly accurate or possibly on the high side. While I can’t speak on every town and city in America, it can safely be assumed that you will still have line pressure from your city supply (or whatever utilities you have) for several days, but, so will everyone else. That could be a good or a bad thing. Sure, you could store more water by going out and getting more containers, but that would defeat the objective of being able to avoid danger. 

Additionally, we discount the ability to source outside sources. Even if at some point, things will slow down and you would have the ability to seek an outside water supply, you wouldn’t want to attempt this. Not only does it go against the purpose of the exercise, but consider that the further into this apocalyptic event we go, the more desperate people will be for nearly anything of value. You may live next to a perfectly good water supply. But so do everyone else around you. Again, the name of the game is to wait it out. 

Yet, when reviewing this 37 day estimate and how it would fair in waiting out the storm, all I could think was that the average household has the same capability. That doesn’t mean the average household would exerciseapproach our own “lockdown” approach, but it does certainly mean that “waiting them out” for an appreciable amount of time isn’t going to happen. We would need a lot more water to buy us a lot more time. Additionally, these open air containers would be severely susceptible to leakage, contamination, and evaporation.

Buying an Appreciable Water Supply

Obviously, the easiest way to fix this problem would be to supplement my stores of bottled water. While you can’t put a price on safety and your welfare, the fact remains that bottled water is incredibly expensive. Okay, I know everyone is raising their eyebrows at me. It’s just bottled water! Are you that cheap? Well, we aren’t talking about needing a case or two. We are talking about needing 100 gallons. Just a quick Internet search shows that you can buy a gallon of water for $5.70. So, you could spend $570 dollars and only buy yourself a month worth of water. Where are you going to store it? I sure don’t have a place for that much water. Maybe you do. If you do, you either have no kids or a lot bigger home than me. I know these people exist; good for them. We have seen them on those TV shows. When money isn’t an issue, you can do these things. I can’t. Money and space aside, this is a fantastic option for many reasons. Perhaps the best reason is that the water is sealed and impervious to becoming contaminated. Additionally, you will not have any losses from evaporation or leakage. 

Rainwater Collection

What about rainwater collection? Ah, now we are getting somewhere! Again, let’s make the assumption that you can safely collect water without exposing yourself to others. What do you have in which to collect water? We added all the collection containers we have in the list above. Even if we used every cup and bowl we had and could store 100 gallons, the amount of rainfall is the true driver. Additionally, it has less to do with available volume of your containers than the surface area of the collector. In my state of Alabama, the rainfall averages around 65 inches per year. Let’s say that’s 5.5 inches a month, since we are talking in terms of days and months. Additionally, the heaviest rain we might ever see is around five inches overa period of three days. Again, another nice number when we contemplate the time of dehydration being around three days. Five inches is about 1/6 the height of the average 5-gallon bucket. We said that we had the ability to store 100 gallons total, which is equivalent to 20 five- gallon buckets. That rain collection could give us around another 20 gallons, which is not even good enough for another two days. 

Again, rainwater collection is a complicated formula of available basins and rainfall. The other potential answer is the application of cisterns. For example, for under $500 you can add onto your house a rain water collection system, which will collect all the water from your roof into a collection tank via a “T” added into your drain spouts. While you can add as big of a basin as you like, the average system uses a 40 to 50 gallon drum. My father uses one of these for his garden, and it took one large rain to completely fill it up.. Going back to our math we used in the above paragraph, if the weather averaged three rains a month you would collect 150 gallons a month. This if you quickly and efficiently maximized the storage. 

Which means, without taking losses in the system into consideration, you would be able to sustain yourself with a rainwater collection system indefinitely, as long as you have the amount of rainfall we have in soggy Alabama. There are some assumptions in this statement.. First, it assumes you experience AVERAGE rainfall and that the water is usable and not tainted. Alabama is a very moist climate. In fact, Alabama leads the nation in rainfall. Even here we can go through severe dry spells over the period of a month. In much of the country, the rainfall for the year is nearly nonexistent. Arizona, for example, has a 24 inch per year average. Ohio has an average of 47 inches, while Maryland checks in at 50 inches of rainfall. In fact, most of the nation experiences an average of 30 inches or more rainfall per year. So, our use of Alabama’s rainfall is a best case scenario. On the average, you would be lucky to experience half of the rainfall we have in Alabama, so you would still need to supplement your rainwater collection with a minimum of 15 gallons of water per month sourced from somewhere else, or you would have to expand the capacity expected from a single rainwater collection system. Again, it’s not really a problem to expand. You just need another roof and another rainwater collection system as well as luck that you don’t go through a dry spell. Additionally, if you already had this system set up, you would possibly have an instant 50 gallon surplus in addition to anything else you had on hand. 

Water Recovery

Obviously, the best answer is a “closed loop” system, or as near to it as you could reasonably achieve. That is, recovering used water from urine, sweat, and other by-products. By “best” I mean efficiency. You could buy or design a tool to do all the work for you, but, unless you have developed “still suit” technology (like the one in Herbert’s “Dune”), there is virtually no way to close the system entirely. The best you could hope for is to recover water from urine. While this is certainly achievable, it departs from the more simplistic methods listed above. You either have to have a filtration system on hand (which can be quite expensive), or you have to build your own. Even this isn’t a closed loop system because you will still lose a significant amount of water per day through respiration and sweat, just as you would lose much of your water to evaporation. A quick search shows that a human produces around 0.8 liters of urine. This means, at best, you could only recover 40% of your daily water intake, not taking into account other minerals in the urine that would need to be filtered out. That’s not much water to collect, but it is more than the average person would be able to recover. And, we said from the beginning that we wouldn’t be trying to survive forever on what we had in our home; we just want to survive LONG ENOUGH. After all, when the traffic dies down, procuring supplies such as water will be easy, but until then you won’t have to subject yourself to the dangers outside. Of course the downside is that you are drinking your own urine. Okay, I can get around that idea, but with a homemade system (even with off the shelf systems) you can run the risk of poisoning yourself because of some filtering error. 

Conclusion

So, where does that leave us? Hopefully you have at least identified which of these techniques would work for you. At a minimum, I hope we have learned that while having guns and dehydrated food is great, it isn’t the resource we need every day in great supply.

In a situation where you are waiting out the outside world, it would ultimately be nice to have enough water stored so you don’t have to worry about it. Chances are, if you are reading this, you have either handled your water issues or at least considered it. Many have thousands of gallons stored away. I have neither the money to buy it nor the space to store it. If you are like me, we can maximize our in-home capacity as much as possible.. After reviewing the prospective techniques and tactics above, it seems fairly intuitive that the average person would have to rely on multiple, if not all, of the techniques. To be successful, a person would have to immediately identify the problem at hand and set in motion a plan to stock up and sustain the one most basic and essential commodity that humans need and need in vast quantities. Like we noted, my family alone would need 12 liters or 3 gallons a day just for consumption in normal operating environments. That doesn’t take into account the needs for sanitation and hygiene which really are extensive, especially with three kids. Perhaps most importantly, this doesn’t take into consideration the potential losses to evaporation and stagnation. It’s hard to put a number on that for every locale, but you can reasonably take the 100 gallons need for consumption and add a 20% buffer to account for losses. Add in another 50 gallons for miscellaneous sanitation and other uses and you would need 170 gallons a month, which means that my home would need to essentially do everything listed. We would need to immediately store as much water as we could in bathtubs, sinks, bottles, and buckets. We would need at least one rainwater collection device capable of collecting 50 gallons per month. Additionally, we would also need to be able to recover 20% of our urine water. All of these actions would just meet our basic needs on an average month. The easiest solution to exceed our break-even point would be to stockpile more sealed containers of water. 

That’s a pretty razor-thin edge. When you have a family, the edge is not where you would prefer it be. Ideally, you want a nice cushion when it comes to consumables, particularly water. So, the logical answer is that you would need the combination of at least two of the proposed techniques.  I don’t know about you, but I really don’t want to drink my or my kids’ pee. It’s relative efficiency is low. So (to me) it’s a great long term solution, but not in the timeline we are talking about. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do it; I would,but it wouldn’t be my preference. In terms of buying a water supply, I have neither the room nor the cash to go out and buy 100 gallons of bottled water. I do have some on hand, and I have no problem buying a little at a time to store as I have room. I have the option, as does everyone, of storing water in available open air containers, but I don’t necessarily like this technique because it isn’t efficient due to leaks, evaporation, and difficulty keeping the water viable. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a great last ditch effort or a way to supplement your own supply. In particular, this is probably the best way to provide yourself a “general use” supply of water. A rainwater collection device is almost a necessity. It does cost a little money, but it easily collects and stores water with no effort from you. It is renewable as long as it rains, but may be unreliable without dependable rainfall. Depending upon the reasons for bunkering down, the water could be useless. It may be a stretch, but if radiation or chemical warfare is the concern, you’re probably dead anyway. 

There are many combinations of these four different processes. I realize that everyone’s situation is different. We really only considered one particular situation–the typical urban American home. Considering that’s where the vast majority of American’s live, I believe the example is pertinent. It’s important to understand what your situation is. In mine, rainfall usually isn’t a problem. With the combination of 50 gallons of bottled water and a rainwater collection system, I would get by for a month. The point is, you have to realize that water is ultimately the most valuable resource. It’s the only resource you must have in great supply and one you can’t go very long without. In a situation where you have identified that you want to wait out the storm, you have to take steps to have enough of this resource or a way to collect and use it without exposing yourself to the outside world. 

Just as reading a book taught me one small thing, hopefully this article will get you thinking on how best to prepare yourself with the means to supply your family with water while waiting “it” out.