The ABC's of SHTF Water Purification

Everybody knows that the human body is 70% water, the earth is 70% water. According to the rule of three’s the human body cannot survive more than 3 days without it. One of the largest problems the world faces is supplying clean drinking water. Thousands of people die every day across the world a result of bad water. If our sophisticated water filtration infrastructure were to fail we might find ourselves experiencing the same fate. How can we prepare for such an event to ensure that our families can have plentiful, safe, drinking water? More importantly, how can we prepare when we might have limited resources and must rely on renewable methods of purification?

On the surface it appears simple enough, purifying water. But how can you be sure you’ve removed all of the undesirable chemicals, biological contaminants, suspended solids, and gases from contaminated water? Without sophisticated water tests drinking water can be a gamble. What we need to do is understand water itself, what can contaminate the water we drink, and how the methods of purification work.

Water itself has a few characteristics that we exploit in purification. First, a water molecule is small, roughly 100 times smaller than a virus and 1000 times smaller than bacteria. Right off the bat this tells you water can fit through places viruses and bacteria cannot. The second property of water we can exploit is its ability to exist as a solid, liquid, and gas within a relatively small temperature range. Water also has a few characteristics that work against purification, such as its natural solvency. We think of water as a very inert material yet in reality it is the known as the universal solvency. Many nasty substances will dissolve in water.


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