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The following is part of a paper i prepared for the organization I work for concerning emergency preparation of drinking water. I would greatly appreciate any comments, corrections, or additions you guys would suggest. This information will be distributed internally and is designed to apply in a wide range of locations...
Thanks in advance for any input. Mac
The Effects of Dehydration
The thirst mechanism (dry mouth) that alerts you to the need to drink often does not “kick-in” until up to 2% of your body weight has already been lost. This initial stage of dehydration will cause fatigue, irritation, nausea, or severe headache. Often dehydration will be overlooked as the cause.
Both the body and brain need to be hydrated to function properly. A loss of 5% body weight due to dehydration corresponds to a 25% loss in physical and mental capacity. Most people who loose 10% of their body-weight due to dehydration will require medical assistance to recover. Death occurs with a 15% to 25% weight loss.
People suffering the effects of dehydration need to replace electrolytes lost through heavy perspiration. Oral re-hydration solution is available as a ready-mix in many pharmacies, especially in tropical countries. Powdered sports drinks such as Gatorade work best if mixed half strength. To make your own oral hydration solution, mix a teaspoon of table salt into one liter of clean water. To this add eight level teaspoons of sugar. Any sugar that you have available is acceptable (Honey, molasses, Corn syrup, brown sugar etc.).
Facing The Worst Case Scenario
If for some reason you find yourself in a situation that you will be without water for more than 24 hours you should drink whatever fresh water you have available as needed and go find more. YOUR WATER SUPPLY HAS BECOME YOUR TOP PRIORITY AND YOU CANNOT ESCAPE THE FACT – AT THIS POINT YOU MUST FIND WATER.
Your body’s need for water is second only to its need for oxygen. You should not attempt to ration drinking water, especially for children. You must drink what your body needs, when your body needs it. The effects of dehydration will greatly decrease your ability to deal with the situation at hand, your dire need to find more water. Once you have begun to dehydrate the tiny amounts of water allowed by rationing do NOTHING to reverse the slide and at best slow it by an imperceptible margin.
For instance a 150-pound man who realizes by his dry mouth and discomfort that he is thirsty has already lost 2% of his body weight. That translates to 3 pounds or about a quart/liter of water. By the time he reaches a 5% weight loss he has lost 7.5 pounds of water weight or about equivalent of a 2 liter bottle. By allowing himself a “Hollywood water ration” of several capfuls an hour or some such nonsense he is doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to reverse his slide into dehydration. His physical activity and environmental conditions are extracting water from his system at a far greater rate than he is replacing it. In a short time he will drop to a 10% weight loss, or 15 pounds, more than 2 2-liter bottles.
If water is not available you must conserve the only water you still have INSIDE YOUR BODY. You cannot control your waste elimination; your body will devote water to this task automatically. Your body will use water to digest food and will take that water from your body tissues if you do not drink before a meal. If you have no water you should not eat food, especially protein (meat). The digestion of meat uses far more water than the digestion of carbohydrates (sugars and starches). If you eat nothing your body will be able to eliminate waste with the water it would have to devote to digestion.
If you ration anything you should ration perspiration by keeping in the shade and limiting physical activity until it is cooler. Perspiration is the number one enemy of a dehydrated person and the only route of water loss that you can directly control. By limiting food intake and physical activity you can conserve your strength to a search for water after it cools off in the evening.
If you must drink untreated water, let it stand in a container for an hour to allow sediment to settle. Filter the water through a T-shirt, clean handkerchief, or charcoal to remove as many contaminates as possible. The incubation period of any water-born illness is probably longer then your “survival ordeal” will last. Once you are rescued they will be able to treat any illness you may have contracted.
Under no circumstances should you drink seawater (or urine). In order to eliminate seawater from the stomach the body first reduces the salt concentration by robbing water from body tissues. This greatly compounds the effects of dehydration. With a minimum of planning, however, such a situation would never need to occur.
Emergency collection of drinking water
HIGH YEILD/LOW EFFORT WATER PRODUCTION The high yield/low effort methods produce enough water to live on without a great price in perspiration. The more complicated methods, such as digging or solar stills tend to produce little more water than the sweat they cost.
Taking water from flowing or standing surface sources: streams, puddles, lakes, rivers, ponds, or swamps. This seems obvious but people routinely pass up water sources because they don’t “look good enough to drink”. Water from the worst looking algae laden frog pond can be made biologically safe to drink. In fact, the presence of small water creatures is a good indicator that the water is free of dissolved toxic chemicals. Unless the water source has some type of industrial or agricultural pollution you should make use of it by treating the water as best you can. NOTE: Flood waters are highly contaminated with raw sewage and other waste and can only be made pure by distillation.
Collection of rainwater: Rainwater that falls directly from the sky to a clean collector/container is pure water and does not need to be treated. If the rainwater is falling through a canopy of leaves or vegetation it will need to be filtered and treated. Use a poncho or plastic bag to collect and direct water into a container. Allow a clean towel or shirt to soak up falling rain and wring it into a container.
If you are caught in an open boat at sea rain collection is essential. Your clothing and other rain collection surfaces will most likely collect a high concentration of sea salt during dry conditions due to the evaporation of sea-spray. This excess sea salt needs to be washed away with ordinary seawater before you use that article to collect fresh rainwater. Once an article of clothing has been washed with seawater and wrung out its salt content is no greater than the surrounding sea. As soon as fresh rainwater hits it the resulting brackish water will have less salinity than seawater. In short order the rain will wash the article of clothing until only fresh water is being collected. If you do not wash the clothing in fresh seawater first you will simply dissolve the high salt concentration into your fresh rainwater, essentially collecting seawater.
Melt snow over a fire. Fill a net bag, shirt or other cloth sack with loose snow and hang it next to your fire where it will be out of the smoke but close to the radiant heat. Collect the dripping water in a container placed below.
Dew collection. Often in dry areas heavy dew will form in the early morning hours. Pass a towel or t-shirt over wet vegetation or rocks until it is sopping wet then wring it out into a container. This method can produce copious amounts of water if the dew is heavy but the water is often muddy or cloudy. Whatever dust had settled on the leaves will be sopped up as well. This water should be filtered, boiled, or treated chemically.
Taking water from plants. Many vines contain a great deal of water, they can be cut to allow the water to drain from a hanging section or drip into a container. The trunk of a bananna tree will continue to pump water for a day or so after being cut. Hollow out the top of the stump and it will fill with water. Likewise sections of bamboo often contain large amounts of water.
Treating Your Own Drinking Water
Treating your own drinking water is easy to learn, inexpensive, and compact enough to travel with you anywhere you go. There is NO EXCUSE for not carrying the means to treat water.
Distillation is the only common method to render seawater, flood water, or water contaminated with dissolved heavy metals, industrial, or agricultural pollutants safe for human consumption. To distill water use a large pot to boil water and direst the steam against a pot lid, the inside of another large pot suspended at an angle over the boiling pot. Pure distilled water will condense on the suspended condenser and drip into a container. The following methods can be used to treat any water that is already free from dissolved contaminants.
Solar Disinfection aka. SODIS: Ultra Violet light kills microorganisms in water. “Sunlight treats the contaminated water through two synergetic mechanisms: Radiation in the spectrum of UV-A (wavelength 320-400nm) and increased water temperature.” http://www.sodis.ch/index.html
A clear one or two liter soda bottle filled with clear water, left on its side in direct sunlight for six hours will be biologically safe for human consumption. To use this method, fill the bottle ¾ full with CLEAR water and shake for 20 seconds to aerate the water. Fill the bottle to capacity and cap tightly. Lay the bottle in an area where it will receive DIRECT SUNLIGHT from morning to evening for at least six hours. Heat increases the effectiveness of solar disinfection and decreases the time of exposure necessary. If the water reaches 50 degrees centigrade an exposure time of one hour is sufficient.
Boiling drinking water will make it biologically safe but in practice it is very difficult to do consistently over the long term. It is the most time and energy consuming method available. Older literature has called for boiling times of up to a half hour, but these have been proven an unnecessary waste of time and energy. According to the EPA, water must be brought to a rolling boil for one minute. There is nothing to be gained by boiling longer. A general rule of thumb is to bring small pans of water to a rolling boil for a minute or two and allow larger pots to boil a little longer to ensure that all the water in the pot has boiled.
Once water has been boiled there is nothing to prevent it from becoming contaminated again. It should be stored in clean, closed containers, preferably in a refrigerator and you should only make enough for one day at a time.
Iodine is the best method for short-term (3 - 6 months) personal, family, or travel use. Pregnant women and people with thyroid problems should not use iodine. Iodine added to drinking water kills the bacteria and microorganisms that cause disease. Larger cysts (disease organisms in hibernation) that are resistant to iodine can be removed by first filtering the water through a ceramic filter. Pre-filtering (through any filter medium) increases the effectiveness of the iodine.
Two percent tincture of iodine, available at any pharmacy, can be used to disinfect water by adding 5 drops per quart/liter. This measure can safely be doubled if the water is cold or cloudy. Once the iodine has been added you must wait at least a half hour for it to sterilize the water. If the water has been taken from a stagnant surface source it is best to use the maximum dose of iodine (10 drops) and wait a full hour before drinking.
Water treated with iodine will be slightly brown in color and have a faint medicinal taste. This water will also react with any starches in food causing the water to turn blue. To remove both the taste, color, and reactivity of the iodine add 50 mg of ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) to the water AFTER waiting the prescribed half hour. The ascorbic acid reacts instantly with the iodine, making the water clear and tasteless again, eliminating the “gag factor”.
This Iodine/Ascorbic acid system can be purchased commercially in tablet form called Potable Aqua Plus, available at Wal-Mart and camping stores. Each bottle of Potable Aqua will treat between 25 to 50 liters of water.
For long-term home use the most cost effective method is a gravity-fed ceramic water filter combined with chlorine bleach. Even if you purchase a home water treatment system you should be familiar with this method as a back up.
Ceramic filters employ an upper chamber of several-gallon capacity and a lower reservoir to collect the filtered water. The microscopic pores of the ceramic filter strain out suspended dirt, bacteria, and single-celled organisms. The upper chamber needs to be filled daily and cleaned every so often. Ceramic filters are too porous to filter out virus. Also like boiled water there is nothing to prevent the water from becoming infected again. The water in the lower reservoir can become infected if the lower chamber is dirty.
Once the water has been filtered, ordinary Chlorine bleach (Clorox) can be used as a cost effective means to chemically disinfect and preserve it. Use of chlorine allows you to duplicate the same process used in many municipal water treatment systems in the US only on a much smaller scale. Any brand of chlorine bleach will do as long as you use only pure, unscented bleach.
To safely treat water you need to know the percentage of available chlorine in the bleach. This information will be printed on the bottle. According to the EPA the safe dosages are as follows: 1% available chlorine – add 10 drops per quart, 4%-6% available chlorine – add 2 drops per quart, 10% available chlorine – add 1 drop per quart. The water must sit for a half hour to allow the chlorine to take effect.
To treat larger containers obtain a clear plastic 60 ml syringe. Calculate the number of drops needed to treat the volume of the container for the percentage of available chlorine in your solution. Remove the plunger of the syringe, plug the end and fill the syringe with the required number of drops. For instance to treat a 5 gallon water jug with 6% chlorine fill the syringe with 40 drops and mark the level. From then on you simply fill the syringe to that level instead of counting drops.
At these dosages a few jugs of Clorox will last a whole term on the field. Compare the time and expense of treating your water with the time and expense of treating your family and you will see it is not costly.
Thanks in advance for any input. Mac
The Effects of Dehydration
The thirst mechanism (dry mouth) that alerts you to the need to drink often does not “kick-in” until up to 2% of your body weight has already been lost. This initial stage of dehydration will cause fatigue, irritation, nausea, or severe headache. Often dehydration will be overlooked as the cause.
Both the body and brain need to be hydrated to function properly. A loss of 5% body weight due to dehydration corresponds to a 25% loss in physical and mental capacity. Most people who loose 10% of their body-weight due to dehydration will require medical assistance to recover. Death occurs with a 15% to 25% weight loss.
People suffering the effects of dehydration need to replace electrolytes lost through heavy perspiration. Oral re-hydration solution is available as a ready-mix in many pharmacies, especially in tropical countries. Powdered sports drinks such as Gatorade work best if mixed half strength. To make your own oral hydration solution, mix a teaspoon of table salt into one liter of clean water. To this add eight level teaspoons of sugar. Any sugar that you have available is acceptable (Honey, molasses, Corn syrup, brown sugar etc.).
Facing The Worst Case Scenario
If for some reason you find yourself in a situation that you will be without water for more than 24 hours you should drink whatever fresh water you have available as needed and go find more. YOUR WATER SUPPLY HAS BECOME YOUR TOP PRIORITY AND YOU CANNOT ESCAPE THE FACT – AT THIS POINT YOU MUST FIND WATER.
Your body’s need for water is second only to its need for oxygen. You should not attempt to ration drinking water, especially for children. You must drink what your body needs, when your body needs it. The effects of dehydration will greatly decrease your ability to deal with the situation at hand, your dire need to find more water. Once you have begun to dehydrate the tiny amounts of water allowed by rationing do NOTHING to reverse the slide and at best slow it by an imperceptible margin.
For instance a 150-pound man who realizes by his dry mouth and discomfort that he is thirsty has already lost 2% of his body weight. That translates to 3 pounds or about a quart/liter of water. By the time he reaches a 5% weight loss he has lost 7.5 pounds of water weight or about equivalent of a 2 liter bottle. By allowing himself a “Hollywood water ration” of several capfuls an hour or some such nonsense he is doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to reverse his slide into dehydration. His physical activity and environmental conditions are extracting water from his system at a far greater rate than he is replacing it. In a short time he will drop to a 10% weight loss, or 15 pounds, more than 2 2-liter bottles.
If water is not available you must conserve the only water you still have INSIDE YOUR BODY. You cannot control your waste elimination; your body will devote water to this task automatically. Your body will use water to digest food and will take that water from your body tissues if you do not drink before a meal. If you have no water you should not eat food, especially protein (meat). The digestion of meat uses far more water than the digestion of carbohydrates (sugars and starches). If you eat nothing your body will be able to eliminate waste with the water it would have to devote to digestion.
If you ration anything you should ration perspiration by keeping in the shade and limiting physical activity until it is cooler. Perspiration is the number one enemy of a dehydrated person and the only route of water loss that you can directly control. By limiting food intake and physical activity you can conserve your strength to a search for water after it cools off in the evening.
If you must drink untreated water, let it stand in a container for an hour to allow sediment to settle. Filter the water through a T-shirt, clean handkerchief, or charcoal to remove as many contaminates as possible. The incubation period of any water-born illness is probably longer then your “survival ordeal” will last. Once you are rescued they will be able to treat any illness you may have contracted.
Under no circumstances should you drink seawater (or urine). In order to eliminate seawater from the stomach the body first reduces the salt concentration by robbing water from body tissues. This greatly compounds the effects of dehydration. With a minimum of planning, however, such a situation would never need to occur.
Emergency collection of drinking water
HIGH YEILD/LOW EFFORT WATER PRODUCTION The high yield/low effort methods produce enough water to live on without a great price in perspiration. The more complicated methods, such as digging or solar stills tend to produce little more water than the sweat they cost.
Taking water from flowing or standing surface sources: streams, puddles, lakes, rivers, ponds, or swamps. This seems obvious but people routinely pass up water sources because they don’t “look good enough to drink”. Water from the worst looking algae laden frog pond can be made biologically safe to drink. In fact, the presence of small water creatures is a good indicator that the water is free of dissolved toxic chemicals. Unless the water source has some type of industrial or agricultural pollution you should make use of it by treating the water as best you can. NOTE: Flood waters are highly contaminated with raw sewage and other waste and can only be made pure by distillation.
Collection of rainwater: Rainwater that falls directly from the sky to a clean collector/container is pure water and does not need to be treated. If the rainwater is falling through a canopy of leaves or vegetation it will need to be filtered and treated. Use a poncho or plastic bag to collect and direct water into a container. Allow a clean towel or shirt to soak up falling rain and wring it into a container.
If you are caught in an open boat at sea rain collection is essential. Your clothing and other rain collection surfaces will most likely collect a high concentration of sea salt during dry conditions due to the evaporation of sea-spray. This excess sea salt needs to be washed away with ordinary seawater before you use that article to collect fresh rainwater. Once an article of clothing has been washed with seawater and wrung out its salt content is no greater than the surrounding sea. As soon as fresh rainwater hits it the resulting brackish water will have less salinity than seawater. In short order the rain will wash the article of clothing until only fresh water is being collected. If you do not wash the clothing in fresh seawater first you will simply dissolve the high salt concentration into your fresh rainwater, essentially collecting seawater.
Melt snow over a fire. Fill a net bag, shirt or other cloth sack with loose snow and hang it next to your fire where it will be out of the smoke but close to the radiant heat. Collect the dripping water in a container placed below.
Dew collection. Often in dry areas heavy dew will form in the early morning hours. Pass a towel or t-shirt over wet vegetation or rocks until it is sopping wet then wring it out into a container. This method can produce copious amounts of water if the dew is heavy but the water is often muddy or cloudy. Whatever dust had settled on the leaves will be sopped up as well. This water should be filtered, boiled, or treated chemically.
Taking water from plants. Many vines contain a great deal of water, they can be cut to allow the water to drain from a hanging section or drip into a container. The trunk of a bananna tree will continue to pump water for a day or so after being cut. Hollow out the top of the stump and it will fill with water. Likewise sections of bamboo often contain large amounts of water.
Treating Your Own Drinking Water
Treating your own drinking water is easy to learn, inexpensive, and compact enough to travel with you anywhere you go. There is NO EXCUSE for not carrying the means to treat water.
Distillation is the only common method to render seawater, flood water, or water contaminated with dissolved heavy metals, industrial, or agricultural pollutants safe for human consumption. To distill water use a large pot to boil water and direst the steam against a pot lid, the inside of another large pot suspended at an angle over the boiling pot. Pure distilled water will condense on the suspended condenser and drip into a container. The following methods can be used to treat any water that is already free from dissolved contaminants.
Solar Disinfection aka. SODIS: Ultra Violet light kills microorganisms in water. “Sunlight treats the contaminated water through two synergetic mechanisms: Radiation in the spectrum of UV-A (wavelength 320-400nm) and increased water temperature.” http://www.sodis.ch/index.html
A clear one or two liter soda bottle filled with clear water, left on its side in direct sunlight for six hours will be biologically safe for human consumption. To use this method, fill the bottle ¾ full with CLEAR water and shake for 20 seconds to aerate the water. Fill the bottle to capacity and cap tightly. Lay the bottle in an area where it will receive DIRECT SUNLIGHT from morning to evening for at least six hours. Heat increases the effectiveness of solar disinfection and decreases the time of exposure necessary. If the water reaches 50 degrees centigrade an exposure time of one hour is sufficient.
Boiling drinking water will make it biologically safe but in practice it is very difficult to do consistently over the long term. It is the most time and energy consuming method available. Older literature has called for boiling times of up to a half hour, but these have been proven an unnecessary waste of time and energy. According to the EPA, water must be brought to a rolling boil for one minute. There is nothing to be gained by boiling longer. A general rule of thumb is to bring small pans of water to a rolling boil for a minute or two and allow larger pots to boil a little longer to ensure that all the water in the pot has boiled.
Once water has been boiled there is nothing to prevent it from becoming contaminated again. It should be stored in clean, closed containers, preferably in a refrigerator and you should only make enough for one day at a time.
Iodine is the best method for short-term (3 - 6 months) personal, family, or travel use. Pregnant women and people with thyroid problems should not use iodine. Iodine added to drinking water kills the bacteria and microorganisms that cause disease. Larger cysts (disease organisms in hibernation) that are resistant to iodine can be removed by first filtering the water through a ceramic filter. Pre-filtering (through any filter medium) increases the effectiveness of the iodine.
Two percent tincture of iodine, available at any pharmacy, can be used to disinfect water by adding 5 drops per quart/liter. This measure can safely be doubled if the water is cold or cloudy. Once the iodine has been added you must wait at least a half hour for it to sterilize the water. If the water has been taken from a stagnant surface source it is best to use the maximum dose of iodine (10 drops) and wait a full hour before drinking.
Water treated with iodine will be slightly brown in color and have a faint medicinal taste. This water will also react with any starches in food causing the water to turn blue. To remove both the taste, color, and reactivity of the iodine add 50 mg of ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) to the water AFTER waiting the prescribed half hour. The ascorbic acid reacts instantly with the iodine, making the water clear and tasteless again, eliminating the “gag factor”.
This Iodine/Ascorbic acid system can be purchased commercially in tablet form called Potable Aqua Plus, available at Wal-Mart and camping stores. Each bottle of Potable Aqua will treat between 25 to 50 liters of water.
For long-term home use the most cost effective method is a gravity-fed ceramic water filter combined with chlorine bleach. Even if you purchase a home water treatment system you should be familiar with this method as a back up.
Ceramic filters employ an upper chamber of several-gallon capacity and a lower reservoir to collect the filtered water. The microscopic pores of the ceramic filter strain out suspended dirt, bacteria, and single-celled organisms. The upper chamber needs to be filled daily and cleaned every so often. Ceramic filters are too porous to filter out virus. Also like boiled water there is nothing to prevent the water from becoming infected again. The water in the lower reservoir can become infected if the lower chamber is dirty.
Once the water has been filtered, ordinary Chlorine bleach (Clorox) can be used as a cost effective means to chemically disinfect and preserve it. Use of chlorine allows you to duplicate the same process used in many municipal water treatment systems in the US only on a much smaller scale. Any brand of chlorine bleach will do as long as you use only pure, unscented bleach.
To safely treat water you need to know the percentage of available chlorine in the bleach. This information will be printed on the bottle. According to the EPA the safe dosages are as follows: 1% available chlorine – add 10 drops per quart, 4%-6% available chlorine – add 2 drops per quart, 10% available chlorine – add 1 drop per quart. The water must sit for a half hour to allow the chlorine to take effect.
To treat larger containers obtain a clear plastic 60 ml syringe. Calculate the number of drops needed to treat the volume of the container for the percentage of available chlorine in your solution. Remove the plunger of the syringe, plug the end and fill the syringe with the required number of drops. For instance to treat a 5 gallon water jug with 6% chlorine fill the syringe with 40 drops and mark the level. From then on you simply fill the syringe to that level instead of counting drops.
At these dosages a few jugs of Clorox will last a whole term on the field. Compare the time and expense of treating your water with the time and expense of treating your family and you will see it is not costly.
