Everyone knows how critical water is to life. If you stop drinking water for 2-3 days, you’ll die a painful and horrible death. Even a full day without water and you’ll be cramped up, probably too badly to be able to do much of anything. Just a few hours of dehydration can begin to impact your cognitive abilities and reflexes.

Emergencies can happen at anytime. Due to the brief amount of time we can live without water, which as pointed out earlier, is measured in hours, it’s important to prioritize water access when planning for emergencies.

In my area the most likely problem to arise which would jeopardize water quality would be a flood, but even small things can disrupt access to water such as weather related traffic incidents where people have become trapped in their vehicles for days.

In 2022 drivers on the I-95 were stuck in their cars for nearly 27 hours. In 2020, thousands were stuck on a highway in Japan for over two days. The longest traffic jam in history? 12 days.

Carrying a bottle of water, even on short trips is a no brainer. On longer road trips, I bring at least half a gallon of water just in case. At home, I usually store about 20 gallons of water, and soon I’ll be expanding my water storage to at least 120 gallons.

Water Access

Earlier I wrote about the importance of doing an area study. Part of this process is documenting known sources of nearby water. Of course this could be a river, stream, drinking fountains or natural springs. However another option people may not recognize is commercial buildings.

One place to get started is findaspring. This is a free resource to locate natural springs near you. Some springs are tested for purity but some aren’t and due to the fact that many springs happen to exist in places near cow pastures you may still want to filter this water in some way.

Commercial buildings all have outside water access but they don’t have residential spigots. They have a locked spigot that requires a unique key to turn the spigot on. It’s called a sillcock key. You can buy one on Amazon for about $8.

Water Storage

You can find numerous brands of large plastic bags which may be used to store water in your bathtub during an emergency. One brand is Waterbob.

Another option is to buy a large tank to store in a garage or shed. A simpler solution requiring more space would be to buy several smaller 5 gallon jugs along with a rack or storage system to keep them off the ground and protected from UV light. In an emergency it’s safe to assume you’ll need about 1 gallon of water per person per day for drinking and cooking.

Water Filtration

Filter Straws

Filter straws, such as lifestraw are small portable filters that can remove sediment, bacteria, parasites, and microplastics from water. This means in an emergency you can stick it into a muddy puddle to get clean water. They won’t remove chemicals or viruses but in an emergency these are smaller concerns. I’m not too worried about needing to drink from a river but a filter straw only weighs an oz or two and easily fits in a go bag and makes water of virtually any source accessible.

While a filter straw lets you drink any water you can find, you will still need a container. Lifestraw makes several filter bottles. They contain the life straw and a secondary charcoal filter to help remove chlorine and improve taste. This solves the problem the life straw presents, which is needing to hang around near the river. Now you may dip your bottle into any stream or pond, or top up at any dodgy looking faucet or fountain and have a go.

Squeeze Filters – A Family Sized Solution

Another option is the Sawyer Squeeze and similar products that are basically upscaled versions of the lifestraw. These allow you to attach a bag or bucket to your filter and make gallons of clean water at a time. This would be an ideal solution for a flood or other catastrophe where you do not have access to clean water for extended periods of time. Sawyer claims you may be able to filter up to 1,000,000 gallons of water, if you properly maintain your filter.

There are a lot of options when it comes to filter straws and what can be filtered depending on additional filtration mediums included. For example some lifestraw products can reduce heavy metals and organic pesticides while others remove viruses.

Bucket Filter Systems – Sustainable Long-term Filtration

Large bucket based emergency water filters are available on Amazon and other retailers but you may also construct your own using gravel, sand, and activated charcoal. With this system you can filter river water, rain water, or any other source of contaminated fresh water.

Building a setup like this would be useful for cheaply filtering your 100 gallons of hose water for your emergency storage. If choosing to use plain tap water and food grade plastic containers in your backup water solution, it would be a good idea to use a food grade water hose and to re-filter the water again for drinking using a household Brita style filter prior to drinking to remove any plastic flavors.

Keep in mind, there really is no such thing as food grade plastic. All plastics, even those designed to prevent leaching into the stored food or water still do. Even Tritan, a compound which was formulated to avoid estrogenic activity was still found to have an effect. While the results have been in dispute, I avoid plastic whenever possible, however in an emergency situation I would rather drink water from a plastic jug than die from dehydration.

Can’t I Just Use A Brita?

These common charcoal filters are designed to take water already clean enough to drink and mildly improve the flavor. If you tried to remove sediment or biological debris from water using a Brita or similar filter you would clog it up almost immediately. This is because these filters use activated charcoal which is really only suitable as a final stage of filtering. You need the gravel and sand to remove the larger contaminants before the water reaches the charcoal.

Hopefully this post gets you started on thinking about water access during an emergency.