Emergency Preparedness: How to Store Water at Home

This is my first post about a facet of what I like to think of as emergency preparedness. I remember reading stories about people in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city, and many times people didn’t have enough water stored to last more than a day without utilities. Maybe it was Boy Scouts as a kid (shout out to all the other Eagle Scouts out there!), but I’ve always thought it wise to have a little bit of basic preparation in the event of emergencies. If everyone prepared for emergencies in a small way, our society as a whole would end up being a lot more resilient. For society’s sake: Resilience good, vulnerability bad.

When it comes to survival, the Rule of Threes helps drive a lot of how to prioritize for your own situation. The Rule of Threes is pretty widely-known and referred to in the survival community, and some variation of it has been taught and used since I was a kid in Boy Scouts. The Rule of Threes goes something like this, and each successive line assumes the one before it has been satisfied (credit to Wikipedia for the reminder on some of the details):

• You can survive three minutes without air or in icy water
• …three hours in a harsh environment
• …three days without water
• …three weeks without food

I’m keying in on line three here (water), but might address some of the other lines in other posts.

I’m going to lay this out in three phases that I think people can undertake if starting from scratch on water storage. Each progressive phase gets a little costlier but will provide additional peace of mind and capability. Which you decide you’d like to tackle depends on your unique situation and means to accomplish them. Keep in mind that the typical human requirements for water is about a gallon per day per person. Multiply this out if you have others you want to take care of.

Phase 1: The Basics

Phase 1 is essentially to buy a few cases of bottled water or a few gallons of water at the grocery store.

This is the bare minimum. A “standard” case of water might have 24 16.9-ounce bottles in it, which translates to about 3.2 gallons (24 X 16.9 ounces / 128 oz per gallon). If you have a family of four, you’ve almost bought yourself one full day of water usage with one case of water. It’s usually a little bit more cost effective to buy water by the gallon than in itty-bitty bottles, so that should be a consideration. However, if you feel like you might have to leave your home in the event of an emergency, full gallon containers don’t travel as well as bottles. If this is your dilemma, a mix of bottles and gallon containers might be your ideal for Phase 1. 

Everyone should be able to attain this level of preparedness. Water is cheap, and storage space for a few cases or gallons should not be daunting for 99.99% of people in the developed world. Try to ensure this water is stored someplace that is out of direct sunlight, preferably in your home. However, even if you end up keeping it in the trunk of your car and the bottles are leaching plastic into your water due to the heat of summer, you’re still better off having water to drink in an emergency and can worry about the long-term effects of plastic-ing yourself once you’re alive on the other side of the emergency.

Bottled water usually lasts a long time in a temperature-controlled environment. Once you satisfy this phase, you basically don’t ever have to think about it again.

Phase 2: A Bigger Commitment

Phase 2 is to buy some additional storage containers to add resilience.*

Finally, a nice little item to have handy in the event that you can foresee the loss of home water service is a product that goes into your bathtub that you fill with water from your tap, called an Aquapod (<—AFFILIATE LINK). The product I’ve linked to is a newer version of one that we store under the bathroom vanity just in case. Should provide between 65-100 gallons of water storage, depending on your bathtub size, and has a hand pump to help fill containers. Though I haven’t had occasion to use it, the product provides me a little additional peace of mind. I think it probably beats filling up your bare bathtub. However, if a bare bathtub is all you’ve got in an emergency, don’t forget to use it! You can always disinfect this water later.

Phase 3: Creating Your Own Potable Water

Phase 3 is to learn how and acquire the tools necessary to create your own potable water.

I struggled with whether to recommend a larger storage tank for people. The Prepared offers an article on it if you’re interested. I think if you have a good amount of water containers pre-stored, it becomes more important for a long-term emergency scenario to figure out how to replenish your supply as opposed to storing your way out of the problem. There are a few reasons for this. First, getting a 50 or 250 gallon water storage tank is out of reach for a lot of people based upon space requirements and, maybe, cost. Second, I think this problem comes down to a “give a man a fish, teach a man to fish” scenario. Chances are you live in an area in which it rains or snows. So long as we haven’t had a nuclear bomb go off (which presents its own lengthy list of additional requirements to survive), you can collect and purify water. If you happen to live in a place where it doesn’t rain or snow, this phase probably isn’t for you—you’ll almost certainly have to leave your home in the event of a long-term emergency situation. Sorry.

There are a host of ways to skin this cat of creating your own potable water. I’d like to outline what I plan on doing and the tools I have at my disposal to help with this, rather than list  the various ways you can accomplish it. After all, this is a blog and not an encyclopedia or field manual. 🙂 The important thing for anyone’s planning here is to create redundancies and resiliency in your plan. If all you have is one water filter, and it breaks, then you have no water filters and not a lot of options. Get where I’m coming from?

To start, we have to get water. Luckily here in the mid-Atlantic, we don’t have tons of droughts. If we did, that’s what the stored water in Phase 2 would help ride out! To get water, we would rely on catching it when it falls out of the sky. This is a little bit less reliable than if we had a stream or pond on our property, but it should work nonetheless. There are two relatively simple methods to make this work.

The first is to setup tarps that angle towards 5-gallon buckets (like the useful ones from Home Depot) or those giant keg buckets. I happened to have bought an 8-pack of those 17-gallon keg buckets a few years ago for whatever reason—they’d be great for this. We have a few of these tarps (<—AFFILIATE LINK) that are very heavy duty (16 mil!) and I’ve used for a lot of purposes over the years. If you’ve never looked into shopping for tarps, basically don’t bother. These are the best—they’re tough as nails, they’re thicker than all their competitors, and I like them as much as a person could like a tarp at around $40.

The second method for catching rainwater, since we’re lucky enough to live in a house, is to collect it when it comes down the downspouts off the roof. This method is going to give us a lot more to filter out later, but it’s also a lot more efficient for collection purposes. Again, the 17-gallon keg buckets are going to be mighty handy in this scenario. We have a bunch of downspout extenders which we could just pick up and plop into the bucket when it rains. A bead of silicone around where the downspouts connect to the gutters as well as along the gutter seams themselves close to ground level would ensure enough water doesn’t leak out and makes this effective.

So we’ve now harvested our rainwater. Next step is to filter out any large sediment, which we would likely do with a combination of old window/door screens and layers of t-shirts underneath them. On a smaller scale, I’ve used socks to do this while camping. Set the sock up over the top of a container, pour water through the sock into the container. You can use coffee filters if you’re fancy. Same idea. Once the sediment is filtered out, then we have to purify the water so it’s safe to drink.

We have several methods to purify water at our disposal, and might emphasize one or another based on the circumstances. 

1. If we have electricity, we would boil the water using our stove top (wow, that was easy). 
2. In the event we didn’t have electricity, we could boil the water on the side burner on our propane grill (so long as we have enough propane). 
3. If neither of those methods worked for us, then we could add unscented bleach to the water. Add 8 drops per gallon of water, stir it (or shake it if you’re 007), and let it sit for 30 minutes (according to the EPA). Voila! 
4. Out of bleach, electricity, and propane? I have a backpacking filter that uses a hand pump to filter water. The one I have is an MSR ceramic pump filter (<—AFFILIATE LINK) that has served me well over the years of drinking out of lakes, streams, the Potomac River, and other sources of ill-repute. It’s labor intensive if you’re going to pump enough for a family, but it works. 
5. For long-term water filtration, these are last on my list of redundancies, but LifeStraws or Sawyer pumps are great options for just about anyone to keep in their home to give you a pretty fat supply of on-demand purified water if you’re able to harvest rainwater or otherwise.

That does it for this post. Sorry for the length, but even in what I covered I’m only scratching the surface. What am I overlooking? What kind of redundancies do you have in place for your planning purposes?

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*These containers are also great for car camping!