Water Storage for Emergencies

Emergency water storage is often the first step on the road towards better preparedness. The FEMA recommendations, which should be thought of as a bare minimum, are at least one gallon per person per day, with a two week supply on hand. Since most Americans use between 100 and 200 gallons a day in non-emergencies, it is easy to need even more water storage.

A good first step is to develop a water storage plan. This is just a matter of setting a storage goal by figuring how many people will be using the stored water and for how long, then deciding the best way to keep it around. The FEMA water recommendations are a good starting point but do not figure in for activities like flushing toilets and taking showers, so they can fail to meet expectations. A better plan is to come up with a personalized estimate by figuring out how much water will actually be needed by your household per day to cover drinking, personal hygiene, washing dishes, flushing toilets, etc. Do keep in mind that it can be easier and ultimately cheaper to reduce water consumption by changing behaviors, such as using a portable toilet instead of flush toilets during emergencies. Also, keeping some paper plates and plasticware tucked away in an emergency bucket helps reduce dishwashing.

Once we figure out how much water should be available, the next step is to decide how to store it. Fortunately, this is not something that has to be done all at once. We can work towards our goal one step, or one paycheck, at a time and move from three to seven to ten or fourteen days worth of reserves. The easiest way to get started with water storage is to just pick up a few cases of bottled water from the store. If you are starting from zero, then this would be a good first step to take this week.

Since it takes a little over seven and a half bottles of Dasani to make a gallon, this is not an efficient way to store more than a few days worth of water. While it is certainly possible to get some H2O out of your toilet tank (don’t drink it) or hot water heater in an emergency, having to scoop anything out of your toilet is a pretty good sign that some plan has fallen short. Fortunately, there are plenty of water storage options on the market, each with its own trade-offs.

WaterBob is a cheap way to turn a bathtub into one hundred gallons of stored water in an emergency. It consists of a plastic liner that is filled up a few langconsists of a plastic liner that is filled up a few langconsists of a plastic liner that is filled up a few langconsists of a plastic liner that is filled up a few ls="to get somnessess- figsiphonth its o in for activitis woulbig4&sr=8

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