Most of the comments down thread underestimate water consumption. Depending on the climate, you'll want the following daily quantities [1]:
- 2-3 gallons for drinking
- 1.5 gallons for hygiene (can skip for a while)
- 0.5 gallons for food prep
The planning factor for military operations was 8 gallons per person per day. Water is heavy—8 pounds per gallon—and acquiring, storing, and moving it is a large effort.
[1] https://cascom.army.mil/g_staff/g3/TTD/Products/QM-How-to-Ha...
It never occurred to me that people needed this spelled out, but I guess it's simpler in most of the world where 1L = 1kg.
The other kind of people who know about the weight of waters are people with campers / trailers and people with fish tanks in their apartments. The maximum allowable size for a fish tank in the middle of the room is not that much.
> It never occurred to me that people needed this spelled out, but I guess it's simpler in most of the world where 1L = 1kg.
It's easy in gallons and pounds, too, if the correct gallon is used: 10 pounds per imperial gallon of water, by definition.
These are all things which are generally known to Americans. But HN has an international audience, for whom "gallon" is presumably somewhat vague.
The average person needs far less than 65lbs (30kg) of water per day, which is a third of the average male weight in the US.
By medical standards humans need more like 8lbs (under 4l) per day for men and 6lbs (under 3l) for women. Less if your rationing and not exerting yourself.
Also you need to clean your home - you don't want to get sick in a catastrophe scenario.
I was on a hike that recommended 1 gallon to complete it for 5 miles round trip.
I’m sure there is a method to the madness of 8 gallons per person that isn’t easy to see. There is a lot of rounding up with the military also.
The way to allow for extras is to store water for a longer length of time. If recommended value is two weeks, and it is in my area, then a month is a good buffer.
Another cool thing is that you can make (in a pinch, I wouldn’t recommend this over berkey filters) filters from the same type of bulkheads berkey uses attached to home-made ceramic filters. They work remarkably well in emergencies and are trivial to make if you’ve got clay and a hot fire. There’s definitely trial and error involved for getting perfect seals, and some advanced DIYers I’ve seen used glazing to create a more easily sealed rim which can have a plastic tube jammed into it for a friction fit, which then attaches to the inner part of the bulkhead.
Totally unnecessary if civilization is working but awesome if things go sideways and you’re out of filters. There might be better methods too, I haven’t looked into it for years.
https://www.surewatertanks.com/collections/products/products...
Another example is food in winter months. During a disaster, even with winter gear, your houee may not be heated. If it is -20C inside, your body will need more calories.
If you're having to go outside to cook, to expel waste, and maybe even to go find snow to melt for water, you're going to need 3x your caloric intake.
You have to plan for worst case usage per day, not best.
OK, no. If you're running a marathon, in hot weather, you're at maybe a liter per hour. Unless you plan to run 20h marathons and the sun never sets, 5 gallon is well beyond drinking needs.
And unless you're able to exert yourself at that level at all, this isn't the "worst case", this is pure fantasy.
And if you're preparing for -20C in your house, I recommend investing in insulation, not more calories stored away. (I also question 3x, the figures I've seen point to 2x, with exertion somewhat counteracting cold)
I've taken to trying to have a minimal set of 4 one liter steel water bottles hung in the closet (grab + go) all the time. So convenient to be able to "just grab some water" on the way out the door, and is the start of a solid emergency prep station.
At least in the US, water jugs are generally very flimsy. An attic is likely to have wide temperature variations throughout the year, and leaky water jugs up there could cause some expensive damage.
55 gallon rain barrels can often be found subsidized and therefore cheap.
Keep a bunch of camping iodine drops around and you are set.
If the municipal water is still functional but non-potable, a LifeStraw Max gets you effectively unlimited water on-demand for most sources of contamination.
Though disaster preparedness and water efficiency are a bit at odds. For the former I'd want to keep all my barrels mostly full, but for the latter I want to keep them empty enough that rainfall events aren't overflowing them and wasting water.
Consider: "The pumps aren't working and there's nothing left up inside the local water-tower."
Then you'd have to travel to get any appreciable amount of water before even starting to filter it.
This happened literally last month in the region where I live, and yes "the taps are dry" is exactly what happened.
The water treatment plant staff detected high levels of toluene in the river which feeds the plant, so as a preventive measure, they shut down the whole thing. It took several days until they managed to get the toluene levels in the river low enough that adding activated charcoal to the water intake could get rid of the rest. In the meantime, there was no water being pumped into the system, and once your building's water tank ran dry (the size varies depending on the building), there was no water anymore (unless you hired a water truck to bring water from a nearby city).
And that's not even the first time this kind of thing happened around here. A couple of years ago, another water treatment plant in the same region (fed by a different river) had trouble due to high levels of geosmin in the river, and they also had to shut down for a while. The result was the same, taps running dry once the building water tanks get empty.
Not to mention that pumping water needs lots of electric power. Not only at the water treatment plant, but several other places in the system need to move water against gravity, or increase its pressure.
mud or damp vegetation can be a water source.
its better to be able to sanitize required quantities on demand.
Live near a lake, stream, etc. and enough firewood to boil water.
You already have the equipment for that. Your existing hot water heater stores enough drinking water for a month at least, probably more if you ration carefully.
But that's not really disaster-relevant, no.
We do get power failures, so it's mostly been for some garden watering, and being able to flush our toilets during an outage. We're on a well, and the pump needs 220v. I suppose I could get a better generator too, ours only does 120v.
Especially as an autotransformer it's pretty cheap (should be about 50$).
I guess we could just start building walls of unopened water bottles in our basement…
(In my teens I saw a family friend had a bag full of food supplies. I asked someone if that was a prep bag, and they said yes. I thought they were a bit weird. Now I’ve come full circle browsing Amazon for cheap doomsday food.)