09161 Water Resilience

Sustainable Water Use is Resilient Water Use

Sustainable water use starts with demand destruction. Now is the time to become a true water conservative! Water is a precious resource — do not waste or pollute it!

Every municipal water system is required to produce an annual report regarding the quality and purity of its water. Get a copy of that report and study it. It is possibly available on line. Contact your municipal government (like a city council person) or water department if you can’t find it.

Find out where your city’s water supply comes from, how much it uses each year, what happens to water discharged from the city’s systems (including its storm sewers), and what the recharge rate is for the watershed or watersheds your city draws on. Is your city using water that is renewed each year by rainfall? Or is it mining ancient waters from underground aquifers or using surface waters faster than they are replenished by the hydrological cycle?

If you suspect a particular issue with the water as it comes from your tap, have it tested. Governments have been known to lie about the results of tests and not inform people of hazards.

If your water tastes bad, or if you are concerned about the purity of your municipal water supply, you may want to use a household water purification system. These are available in a range of sizes and prices and there is literally something for everyone’s budget and situation.

Don’t buy bottled water. It comes with its own environmental cost and there’s no good news there. It’s expensive and should only be used in emergencies or when there is no other choice and you are thirsty.

Stop your personal contribution to water pollution.

Everyone lives in a watershed and everyone without exception is responsible for stopping their own personal contribution to the pollution of their watershed.

Do not dispose of hazardous liquids by pouring down the drain or storm sewers. One quart of oil can contaminate 250,000 gallons of water. All hazardous liquids should be taken to a hazardous waste collection center.

Do not flush old medications, both prescriptions and over the counter medicines. Take them to a hazardous waste collection center. If there is no hazardous or medical waste collection center in your area, the American Pharmacists Association recommends that you dispose of the medications in your regular trash: (1) remove the label with your name or ink over it. (2) Place some water and salt in the pill container, then add something like ashes or cat litter. (3) Seal the container with duct tape. (4) Put it into the trash on the day your trash is collected, concealed under or in something so that if scavengers look at your trash it won’t be noticed. Another alternative is to speak with doctors or nurses. Sometimes non-expired unused medications can be redirected by medical personnel toward people without medical insurance or organizations providing medical treatment in third world countries.

Pick up trash around streams and lakes and shorelines. Organize friends and organizations to help.

Never flush cigarette butts, condoms, tampons, or other solid trash down the toilet. Nothing should go into the toilet except for human waste and toilet paper.

Minimize your use of batteries and recycle used batteries by taking them to a hazardous waste disposal site.

Recycle used motor oil.

Don’t use chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides on your lawn or garden.

Use natural cleaning products in your home. Don’t pour harsh cleaning chemicals down your drains.

Emergency Water Storage.

You need at least a half gallon of drinking water per person per day.

If it’s hot, or you are doing heavy manual labor, you need more.

Children, persons who are ill, and nursing and pregnant mothers need more water.

You need pure water for cooking and hygiene.

So the general resilience recommendation is to store one gallon of water for each person in your household for at least two weeks.

Water storage is one of the most important energy storages in your life. If something happens to the food supply, it takes six weeks to starve to death. That’s a lot of time to make other menu arrangements. If the water supply is compromised or disrupted, you can die of dehydration in only a few days.

Death by water-borne disease, from drinking polluted water, can be agonizing and rapid. It is a primary cause of death in disaster situations.

Storing water increases the water resilience of your life.

Your first line of water storage “defense” is your hot water heater. Depending on its size, it may hold 20 to 50 gallons of water. If there is an emergency, turn off the water supply to your house or apartment. Learn how to do this in advance of an emergency. You can then tap your hot water heater for water. Open a hot water tap somewhere in the house and then open the tap at the bottom of your hot water heater to draw water out of the tap.

If you are a household of four, you will need 56 gallons of water storage. If you have a 40 gallon hot water tank, you will need to storage an additional 16 gallons of water to meet your goal.

Don’t buy bottled water. Instead —

re-purpose some of the glass bottles you can easily find just about anywhere (mason jars, wine bottles, etc.) as water storage.

Wash them.

Sanitize the bottles with a solution of one teaspoon of unscented bleach in a quart of water. Swish the sanitizing solution around the interior. Drain and let sit a few minutes.

Rinse with clean tap water.

Fill with tap water. If you are using tap water from a water utility that treats the water with chlorine, no further treatment of the water is necessary.

Store the water in the dark, and replace it with fresh water every six months.

The only aspect of life in these United States that has converted to the metric system is the beverage industry. One gallon equals 3.78 liters. If you use wine bottles, just figure 4 liters, which gives you a little more than a gallon. You’ll be glad of the extra if you ever have to tap your stored water.

Wrap the bottles in newspaper and store them in boxes for easy handling. If you are using wine bottles, you can probably get free boxes from liquor stores that will fit your wine bottles, complete with cardboard dividers to inhibit breakage.

A standard 750 ML (milliliter) wine bottle is just a bit less than 1/5th of a gallon. So you would need five 750 ML wine bottles to equal one gallon, 60 bottles for a two-week supply of 1 gallon/day/one person if you had no other water available (like a hot water heater).

A standard four-liter jug of wine is 1.05 gallons. Store 14 four-liter jugs of water for each person in your household. This would give you almost 15 gallons of water. For a family of four, that’s 60 bottles, 15 cases total. One innovative storage solution would be to arrange the cases, two cases tall, along a wall. Drape with cloth, and use to display household treasures, books, equipment, etc. Another possible storage area is under a bed.

A less space-intensive water storage solution is a 50-gallon barrel in a closet.

For small living spaces, stock collapsible water storage containers and fill them if it appears that you are at risk of a serious emergency (war, civil disorder, weather, etc.).

Do not use milk or juice bottles for water storage. Yes, if you insist you can use 2 liter plastic pop bottles. The iPermie position is that we should break our dependence on plastic. It is better however to store water in used soda pop bottles than to not store water. If you use plastic, wash and disinfect them the same as you do for the glass bottles.

Emergency Water Supplies

You are unlikely to be able to store enough water to see you through a long term emergency. If there is a water crisis, you have to immediately go into root-hog-or-die mode to find more water. You’ll have friends and neighbors without water, so its imperative that community efforts be quickly mounted to secure water supplies.

If the water supply is compromised or pressure is declining, shut off your connection to the municipal water system. The pipes of your house (or building) and the water heater(s) contain many gallons of water. If the pressure in the municipal system is declining, that water may drain back into the pipes unless you turn off the water.

Many areas have artesian wells. Some neighborhoods have backyard wells. Make an effort to find out if there are any such wells in your neighborhood in advance of a water crisis.

All surface water should be considered contaminated — lakes, streams, rivers, swimming pools, etc. This water can be used, but it must be purified.

When it rains, you can harvest a considerable amount of water if you prepare to do so. Use whatever containers can be found to collect water. Expedient/emergency cisterns can include —

• Holes in the ground lined with plastic or bricks (dig at corners where rain spouts or roofs channel water)
• Wading pools
• Swimming pools
• Bath tubs
• Hot water heaters
• Truck-bed liners
• Trash cans
• Tarps
• Fish tanks
• Soda bottles
• Totes
• Ice chests
• Refrigerators
• Chest freezers
• Cattle water tanks
• Cellars/basements
• Built cisterns (ferrocement)
• Waterbeds

Let it rain hard for about 15 minutes to wash off the roofs, then begin collecting the rain water, or put containers out to collect rain directly. Look for places where water streams off the roof and put your container there to catch the rain. That is better than just putting containers out in the open to catch water. The structure of roofs concentrates rain from hundreds of square feet. Those points where water comes off the roof in a flood are the places for your expedient water harvesting containers.

Emergency Water Purification

Water-borne disease is not a pretty way to die. You need methods to purify water.

The cheapest method is to keep a jug of unscented chlorine bleach on hand. One gallon of bleach will purify 16,000 gallons of water.

Another choice is a commercial water filter/purifier. Get the best quality that you can afford and as many replacement filter cartridges as you can.

Always pre-treat water by removing as much turbidity as you can. Turbidity refers to the cloudiness or dirtiness of water. Your commercial filter is a precious resource that has a limited life. That is, it will only purify a certain amount of water and then it must be serviced, typically by replacing filter elements. While you should get extra filters for replacements, you should clean the water as much as possible before putting it through the filter. That way the filter will not prematurely degrade due to the extra dirtiness of the water.

Settling and pre-filtration are the primary ways to remove turbidity — the cloudiness that dirty water gets — as well as contaminants like dirt and other particles of “stuff.” Settling is simply filling a bucket with dirty water and then letting it sit for several hours or overnight, so the heavier and larger particles mixed in with the water settle to the bottom. Skim off anything that floats.

Once the water settles, do pre-filtration. If you have a siphon, siphon the water from the top — don’t start the siphon by sucking on it and running a risk of getting a mouthful of the contaminated water. Before a crisis, it’s a good idea to buy and store several siphons that can be started by mechanical means. A second alternative is to pour the water, taking care to not stir up the junk that settled at the bottom of the bucket. Make a pre-filter of several thicknesses of cloth. Put the water through this, either by siphon or pouring. Slowly.

Chlorine bleach can purify water. Use plain, old-fashioned, unscented chlorine bleach, the label says "sodium hypochlorite at 5.25%.”

Add 1/4 teaspoon to one gallon of water. Mix thoroughly, and let it sit for 30 minutes.

Boiling can purify water.

Boil water for 10 minutes. “Boil” means a rapid rolling boil, not a few bubbles drifting up. Start timing when the water is rapidly boiling, not when a few bubbles drift up. If you are at higher altitudes, increase the boiling time to 15 minutes. See the printable flyer in document 09151 for more water ideas.

Slow Sand Filtration

Because one never knows when punctuated equilibrium will hit us and take the system as we know it down for the count, be prepared to build household and community water treatment structures that can provide permanent use if city water systems go down and are not restarted.

The primary method low-tech method that is available is slow sand filtration. Document 09151 Printable Flyers has a URL for instructions on building a slow sand filter for home use. The basics are that water is allowed to slowly trickle through a couple feet of sand. After about three weeks of such trickling, a biological layer develops on top of the sand. This biologically active layer is the water purifier, together with the filtering effect of the sand. It takes at least three weeks to get going. Once it is working, it can provide a continuous supply of purified water. The author of the instructions recommends boiling the water after sand filtration unless you can test the water to ensure the filter is working correctly.