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Water in a survival situation

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pepperbegs

Member
Hi,

I know that everyone should keep an emergency stash of bottled water on hand in case of a "Black Swan" event (earthquake,volcano, flood etc).

Is there a way to purify water in a flood. Think New Orleans type deluge. Water everywhere but it has dead animals and humans floating in it. It also has chemicals like gasoline, dry cleaning stuff and god knows what else. Lastly, after a few days the human waste is going in it too.

So if you run out of bottled water and your are on your own how do you make water safe to drink?
 
put it through a coffee filter or some sort of particulit filter and boil it for a while. or set up a stil. should be able to find plenty of parts, could probably even find some RO systems from houses.
 
pepperbegs said:
Hi,

I know that everyone should keep an emergency stash of bottled water on hand in case of a "Black Swan" event (earthquake,volcano, flood etc).

Is there a way to purify water in a flood. Think New Orleans type deluge. Water everywhere but it has dead animals and humans floating in it. It also has chemicals like gasoline, dry cleaning stuff and god knows what else. Lastly, after a few days the human waste is going in it too.

So if you run out of bottled water and your are on your own how do you make water safe to drink?
Click to expand...

heh, never heard of the term "black swan" event. i immediately had images of a half naked natalie portman... umm anyways, supposedly in an emergency, you could had some droplets of bleach to water but this is not one of the more preferable methods:
http://www.doh.wa.gov/phepr/handbook/purify.htm
 
I've gotta really nice RO/DI unit. I wonder if I got a hand pump if running water through that would take care of it? Really contaminated water however would probably screw up the filters/stages.
 
krunchykrome said:
I have water purification tablets. One bottle contains 20 tablets, and each tablet can clean 1 liter of water for drinking.
Click to expand...

That would take care of bacteria/viruses/parasites (check to make sure it will kill Giardia). But what about the chemicals, gas, sewage? The only way I could think of for that would be distillation.
 
pepperbegs said:
Hi,

I know that everyone should keep an emergency stash of bottled water on hand in case of a "Black Swan" event (earthquake,volcano, flood etc).

Is there a way to purify water in a flood. Think New Orleans type deluge. Water everywhere but it has dead animals and humans floating in it. It also has chemicals like gasoline, dry cleaning stuff and god knows what else. Lastly, after a few days the human waste is going in it too.

So if you run out of bottled water and your are on your own how do you make water safe to drink?
Click to expand...

You'd need a distillation column to seperate everything.
 
would a generic filter + boiling do the trick?

or what about just boiling, assuming you don't mind a little dirt in your diet.
 
i have an old boy scout trick for condensing the water from the moist morning air


ill sell it to you for a bottle of water
 
I'm bumping for the afternoon crowd. How can you purify water in a flood situation?

A fairly cheap way to clean up a gallon a day?

Surely some clever lad knows how.
 
pepperbegs said:
I'm bumping for the afternoon crowd. How can you purify water in a flood situation?

A fairly cheap way to clean up a gallon a day?

Surely some clever lad knows how.
Click to expand...

It all depends. You can boil water of course, but if it's chemical contamination you are worried about that won't do it in many cases water becomes bound to them forming an azeotrope even if you were to distill it.

The best thing you can do is keep empty bottles on hand. I have a bunch of one gallon plastic jugs that I fill with purified water for my aquariums. I could do the same for my family.

If you are in dire straits and have to drink from floodwaters then you can still gather the water in bottles, let them sit then decant to leave as much of the sediment as possible. Then you can use coffee filters to get much of the remaining particulates, then boil it. If you have no source of heat then use a small amount of bleach.

http://www.doh.wa.gov/phepr/handbook/purify.htm

I wouldn't worry about short term exposure to chemicals though. The boiling will take care of most of whatever is there which was probably not too much to begin with. Biological contamination is a far far larger problem.
 
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