Survival: the Importance of Water Purification

Water is the most important element in survival. You can live for weeks without food and shelter, but without water you will die. It’s as simple as that. Typically you can survive three to four days, maybe even a week without water if you’re well hydrated and in good shape. For the sake of this article, we’ll go with three days.

First and foremost: never drink un-purified water in the wild. The only time you would even consider this is if you know you are about die if you don’t drink it and you have absolutely no way of purifying it. When your choices are might die and will die, always go with might die.

For long-term survival, you will never be able to carry all the water you need so you will need filters and purifiers. Forget what you’ve heard about drinking unfiltered water from fast moving streams. And for the love all that’s holy, never do anything you saw MacGyver or The A-Team do. That TV stuff will get you killed for sure. All water sources contain critters that can make you sick or dead. So drinking unfiltered stream water is at best a gamble. You may get away with it a hundred times but, you can only die once. Think about what might be upstream: animals, other people, and a million other nasty things.

The most notable biological agents in water are giardia, cryptosporidium, e coli, and naegleria fowleri (brain-eating amoeba.) Seventy percent of U.S. lakes and ponds contain naegleria fowleri and it is always fatal, so you must have a good filter system and purification chemicals in your survival kit. Some may kill one but not the others so, make sure yours kills them all or have different kinds.

If you don’t have a filter or chemical disinfectant, purify water by boiling it before you drink or cook with it. Some say boil for 20 minutes, others say just bring it to a boil. I say we split the difference and boil it for 10 minutes. If you really, really, want to be safe and, no killer aliens from space are chasing you, boil it for 30 minutes. Boiling does not clarify water so its better to filter turbid water through something before boiling. You can use clothing, rags, cheese cloth, sand in a bucket, coffee filters, etc… Just remember – clarification does not equal purification.

During an emergency and when no other means are available, you can purify water with chlorine bleach and iodine. Use about six to eight drops of bleach for a gallon of water and 10-15 drops of iodine. Bleach does not kill amoebas so if your water came from a pond or lake, iodine (or boiling) is needed. Bleach doesn’t really kill bacteria either – it retards the growth of bacteria. You can kill it by hyper-bleaching but then you have to counter the bleach with hydrogen peroxide. We could spend all day on sixth-grade chemistry so let’s just keep it simple, eh?

There are countless varieties of filtration systems and purifiers you can get in a good sporting goods store and online. Though there are billions of places online, I usually go with amazon because its so easy and I’m used to it. Filters are a little expensive, but hey, my life is worth $80. Is yours?