I like the layered
approach to prepping - some people call this the
one-is-none/two-is-one/three-is-two principle. If you've never heard the
saying before it means that having a backup to the backup is a good way to go
because sometimes your first and most obvious choice gets broken, doesn't work
out, runs out of gas or you can't find it when you need it so it's on to Plan B
or C. It works for just about anything.
For example: Water. We all expect that clean and purified water will just pour
out of every tap whenever we want it. Most of the time this is true however one
camping trip showed me that depending completely on someone else wasn't very
wise. About ten years ago we were camping in a provincial park on a busy Thanksgiving weekend
and woke up Monday morning to no water. This wasn't a simple problem that
would soon be fixed - there was absolutely NO water because the beautiful weekend
had brought scores of visitors to the park and basically they had run the
water reservoir dry. It wasn't coming back on. No tea.
No shower. No way to wash your hands. Not a nice wakeup call.
Anita-The-Calm turned into Anita-the-NOT-VERY-HAPPY-CAMPER! Of course in
hindsight the solution was obvious - fill up the large camping containers as soon
as they were empty, have a water filter in the camping equipment and have bottled water on hand. You can bet THAT
situation never happened with the same results again! Did you notice that was THREE ways to deal with the problem?
I also remember when we first were married and living in
a town-house. We were informed that because the neighbour needed to
do some plumbing the water would be turned off the next morning. I didn't
believe them! Why wouldn't they have installed individual shut-offs?
I was sure they were mistaken. I WAS the one mistaken! Half
way through my shower the next morning they shut off the water and being young
and foolish I hadn't filled any containers either.
The other NO-WATER story I've shared in an earlier post. You can find it here: Power Outage. The power went out for 2 days soon after we moved to the farm and we found out the hard way that with no electricity we also had no well pump or sump pump which meant too much water in the wrong place - namely my basement floor - and none coming out of the tap!
These are just a few examples from my own life - can you think of any in yours?
My shelf in the
basement doesn't have quite as many bottles on it as on the rack in this
picture but you can bet we are stocked up on large jugs.
We also have a collection of old juice and water bottles that we refill with tap water. Those
bottles are mostly used for flushing the toilet which of course ALSO
doesn't work without water.
The water gets
rotated out regularly to water plants or poured through our Berkey filter and used as drinking water. We use our Berkey daily because we get our water from a well. It doesn't require electricity and the ceramic filters are washable and do not need replacing for a very long time. We love our Berkey - it takes all the stress out of
wondering if last nights big rain storm overwhelmed the well and contaminated
the water with the run-off . www.Berkeyfilters.com has this to say about their water purification
system.
Berkey water filters provide the ultimate in water
bourne contamination removal. Berkey is used worldwide and sets the
international standard for water filters used in clean or hostile filtration
environments. Able to utilize almost any outside natural source and transform
it to the best tasting, purest drinking water possible, using a natural method
without the use of chemicals or complicated processes.
The Berkey water filter system is so powerful it is
Classified as a purifier, this classification shows that Berkey far exceeds the
abilities of the standard water filter. The portable Berkey can be used to
filter non-potable or unhealthy water in situations where electricity and
pressure are not available. For normal everyday water filtering applications
from your faucet or for challenging filtration environments like wells, rivers
and lakes, Berkey is the most flexible and adaptable filtering system available.
Berkey water costs just 1.7 cents per gallon to produce, the cleanable
replacement cartridge provides an economical, reliable and powerful long term
solution to poor water quality issues that cannot be equaled. Our most popular
model, the Big Berkey has a long standing reputation for quality and service,
this reputation is the reason we are trusted around the world by numerous
international relief organizations to provide clean emergency drinking water to
workers and citizens during times of crisis or natural disaster.
That's already three ways we deal with water on a daily basis and in an emergency
at our home. We could also use the Berkey with water from a rain
barrel or the cistern but it would be a really good idea to pre-filter the
water to remove debris by at least using some coffee filters. Some
people go as far as building elaborate sand filters which are pretty cool and
would make a great home schooling project. Here's a YouTube video that gives a simple explanation and you can find many
more with a Google search.
If you
are in a desperate situation boiling the water will
kill micro-organisms - to be on the
safe side allow the water to boil rapidly for 1 minute - but it won't do anything
about chemical residue so be careful where you find your water. Since I am not a scientist nor a mathematician I will bow to someone with more mathematical skills than I when it comes to purifying water with bleach and other chemicals.
Other
sources of water in a home are the hot water tank and even the toilet tank - if
we're drinking water out of the toilet tank we have big problems indeed!
If ONE-IS-NONE what's your two and three?
