How to Create an Emergency Water Supply

The only thing more important than a dependable, safe and healthy water supply is the air you breathe. But almost everyone is totally dependent to what comes in from the municipal supplier and vulnerable to any crisis or problems that may occur. But everyone should have at least a 3-week supply of good drinking water on hand along with enough additional water for some level of washing and cleaning during that same period.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Things You’ll Need:

• Well, pond or swimming pool (if possible)
• Well bucket and long rope
• Hand pump
• Glass bottles (5-gallon if available, at least 1-gallon)
• Plastic bottles (5- or 1-gallon)
• Water filter (more than one type is best)
• Plastic drums (55-gallon)
• Tin roof (if possible)

1. Dig a well if you don’t have one already. A well for an additional back-up personal water supply won’t have to be very deep in most cases. At my home, there is city water piped in with an old well that is probably only about 80 to 100 feet deep. It runs dry before I can water the garden completely, but it fills back quickly and hasn’t let me down even in a severe drought. A pond can be a good idea as well if you have enough land and live in the country. Another alternative is a swimming pool, which is excellent because you have good protection from outside contamination and can quickly cover it if a crisis develops to prevent animals or vegetation from corrupting the water. If you still have electricity, you can continue to filter it so it may be ready to drink right out of the pool, or if the electricity is out as well, a generator would help to keep the water pure almost indefinitely by running one filter cycle every few days (usually 4 to 6 hours).
2. Acquire a working hand pump and a well bucket if you already have a well or decide to dig one. If there is no electricity to run the pump motor, you will need to either lift the water out with the well bucket or pump out the water by hand. Since all wells now have electric pumps, there will be a pipe running down the middle of the well shaft, which will need to be removed in order to drop the narrow well bucket down to the water level. If you use an old-fashioned hand pump, you may need a relay mechanism to draw the water from one level to another because most wells are too deep to prime using a normal hand pump.
3. Store water in large drums either inside a storage building or garage or outside your house. Replace the water every 6 months or year. You can use this water for washing in case of a water crisis or further purify it for drinking and cooking.
4. Create a tank to collect runoff from a metal roof. You can either place an open 55-gallon drum under the eaves to catch the water as it comes off the roof at an inside corner, or you can route a gutter into it. If you don't have a metal roof, you can create a water shed by building a lean-to shelter with a metal or plastic roof. Even a single 4 x 8-foot sheet of material will render more water than you would think over a period of time.
5. Store good drinking water in glass bottles somewhere inside your house. You should collect as many of these as possible, but probably a total of 50 to 100 gallons will be enough for a 1 to 3 month period for your family. Five-gallon glass bottles are hard to locate, and finding proper caps will be even more difficult. You will find it much easier to locate single-gallon glass bottles—caps included (in which juice is sold). If you can’t find a sufficient number of glass bottles, use 5-gallon hard plastic containers. They are easy to locate and generally are used by water distributors for drinking water. Unfortunately all plastic bottles leach toxic chemicals into your water, so if you plan to store water in them, you should replace it often or rotate it with the water your family normally drinks. The longer the water is left in plastic bottles, the greater the risk of toxicity.
6. Acquire a couple of water filtering systems or devices. Purchase a small camping filter from a trail shop to keep as a back-up. Also, have a larger filter that is either freestanding or installed in the plumbing. These are priced very reasonably and have improved significantly so that you now have many choices at many different price points. Even the pitcher-style filtration devices work very well in quickly turning tap water into good-tasting drinking water.