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| You are Here: Home / The UnImaginable |
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Help Prepare Your Family For
A Hurricane, Ice Storm, Flood... |
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Failure to prepare... is preparing to fail
Without water you will die in a few days. You can survive without food much longer. Why not have quite a bit of both? But don't be the only one on your block who has them! Each person needs about a gallon (about a third to a half of a bucket) of potable water per day, or 30 gallons per month, for drinking, for cooking, cleaning teeth.... Each person also needs about a gallon of not-for-drinking water too, per day, minimum, for doing the dishes, bathing, laundry....
How to store drinking water
You can use cleaned-out 2-litre (about half a gallon) Coke-type bottles. Don't use former milk containers because of remaining bacteria. You can purchase large bottles of spring water. You can store water in hundreds of large Ziploc bags. Double-bag them if you're worried. The clear, plastic, collapsible water containers with a red spout, which you've seen on picnic tables, sell for about $8 and hold 20 litres. I think I'd go with Ziploc bags. The seal on their opening is very strong and you could store hundreds of Ziploc water containers in a spare room and under beds or in a spare bathtub.
I imagine you could line up, say, 30 along a wall, then place an 8" board over them and make another row above the first. And up and up! Perhaps you could use piles of hardcover books as additional supports for the boards. Whatever you use, leave extra air space so that if the water freezes, the ice has room to expand. The rate of expansion is about 10%, but allow for 20.
As a further backup, your hot-water heater holds about 45 gallons of drinkable water. (Without turning off its water supply, drain it in December to remove unsightly but apparently harmless sediments; you can remove remaining sediments by passing the water through a coffee filter or closely woven cloth - like "TilleySilk.")
How to store non-drinking water
The easiest way is to purchase and use the large (25 or so gallon) Rubbermaid-type garbage containers. Rubbermaid cautions us not to use them to store potable water because poisonous chemicals could leach out of them, ones that wouldn't be neutralized by adding a dollop of chlorine bleach to the water. (I've mentioned this as some - not you of course - would otherwise try it.) I'm not suggesting that you should store non-drinking water in them. But I would. As a family needs a lot of water, several of these huge containers could be used to store water that is NOT going to be used for drinking or cooking. Having a hose or tube to use as a siphon might help.
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