jezzyp
Enlightened
If you want an emergency water filtration system check this out
http://www.pwgazette.com/gravity.htm
http://www.pwgazette.com/gravity.htm
Great thread - thanks Sub_Umbra. The link doesn't work for me, but I just went to the root URL and found the products under discussion. The problem is, I can't get the local distributor finder to work. It gives an error. So where can these be purchased?
As much as I like the product I was somewhat dissapointed at dealing with Katadyn when I bought four replacement Ceradyn elements for mine. (Since there are only two of us using it I plug one hole and only run it on two elements -- they still expire [after 3 years] before we use them up.Great thread - thanks Sub_Umbra. The link doesn't work for me, but I just went to the root URL and found the products under discussion. The problem is, I can't get the local distributor finder to work. It gives an error. So where can these be purchased?
That's pretty cool.If you want an emergency water filtration system check this out
http://www.pwgazette.com/gravity.htm
Gray water has been mentioned already a few times. Give some thought to how you'll contain gray water at the various stages before it gets ultimately used to flush a toilet.
In any emergency, modern "Water Saver" toilets are both a blessing and a curse. They are a blessing in that they will use less of your precious gray water with each force flush. (A force flush is when you flush a toilet by just pouring water into the bowl to flush it. Don't fill the toilet tank with gray water as it will eventually clog up the works in the tank.) The bad news of Water Saving toilets in an emergency is pretty much the same as in normal times -- they often just don't work very well and are more prone to getting stopped up. This is exacerbated when the water is off because you're probably going to want to set up some kind of schedule of flushing in an attempt to make your gray water go farther -- perhaps only force flushing 1-3 times in each 24 hour period, depending on how many are in your party.
Our toilet actually uses a little less than 2.5 gallons per flush but it is always somewhat marginal in the way it deals with paper. The last thing you want to do is plug up your toilet during any kind of emergency. IMO the best approach to conserving gray water in a crisis is to dispose of the toilet paper separately. We stock various sizes of Zip-Lok HD Freezer bags and after we use one we don't necessarily throw it right out. We use many of these bags for organizational purposes and once used in that way they are no longer suitable for food. Instead of throwing them away we keep them for other tasks until, like gray water, they get used enough to get rid of. We kept a one gallon Zip-Lok Freezer bag near the stool and just put all of the paper in it. In this way the our commode never stopped up even at a highly reduced daily flush rate. (When the FDA debriefed my wife they really liked the idea of separating out the toilet paper from the rest of the waste.)
I don't think I ever advocated storing water in garbage cans. Filling a disinfected garbage can with water right brfore a storm would not be construed as "storing water" in them IMO. When I think of "storing water" I tend to think of six to eighteen months -- which is a whole 'nother animal....So I'd line the cans with those if I were storing drinking water in them...
Again, STRESS. This is not 'rocket surgery.' Is it really that hard to visualize how destroying +200,000 homes, 70% of businesses, and uprooting close to half a million people from their 'normal' lives may be stressful? Remember that those uprooted may never really come back because the place they left no longer exists. I'm not just talking about physically damaged property. I'm saying that EVERYTHING for the people who lived here has changed. Politics, culture, economics, health care, infrastructure. EVERYTHING. Changes are stressors. I highly recommend reading a pre-K book about disasters called "The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster." It is a great read about the effects of disasters so great that they destroy whole cities. The fact that stress and the deaths caused by it may be hard to quantify does not mean that it is not a major factor and unlike the 'toxic soup' theory of Mayor Ray 'Chocolate City' Nagin which has not been born out by any facts or studies, it is a certainty that there are a plethora of post-K related stresses -- and stress beyond a certain point is very bad. Very much has been written stress in post-K New Orleans and it is out there for anyone who looks for it....If the death rate is 4x higher, what is being stated as causes of death? I.e. if there's more cancer or heart failure, that could result from chemical contaminants without being listed as "poisoning".
Wow! From Y2K? When we moved to a new place a block away ten months ago I opened a few bottles of water that I had gotten less than a year before, after K. The water tasted very much like plastic....I still have a bunch of gallon jugs under my sink that I filled with tap water before Y2K. I don't think I'd drink it at this point but I'm sort of interested in testing some of it somehow, just to find out what really happens when you store untreated water for that long.
It's essentially a very severe/extreme case of PTSD, right?
Isn't that why experts or "been there, done that" people say that the most important tool in your survival kit is the WILL to survive.
That if you are not careful, your mind will kill you if you focus on the "OMG, WHY ME, WHY THIS?!?! WHY GOD WHY?!?!"
That is sooo true. And important. Our preparations and the many options they provided made us much more able to deal with the whole K thing on a rational level. This aspect can not be overstated.That is why it is important to be prepared. People who are prepared normaly are less likly to panic and to think things out befor acting.
Sub_Umbra said:...Here is one of the tricks I used:
http://www.......net/cpf/lock/a.html
Yes, there were a few others, but not many when you consider the population pre-K. According to the Mayor there were only 400 people in town three weeks later when Rita rolled through. Of course, he also said that there was not one murder in the six weeks that followed Katrina -- and reasoned estimates run somewhere around 250 actual murders in the six weeks post-K. Time will tell.