Safe To Drink!


Water is essential to your survival, you will live for a relatively long
 period without food but regardless of the weather conditions prevailing
 you will survive only a few days at most without access to water.
 In desert conditions you will be lucky to last out the day, loss of as
 little as 5% of your body's fluids can result in death.

Even if you have a ready supply of water you may still have problems, is it
safe to drink?  contamination in water can lead to all sorts of complications,
including vomiting and diarrhoea which will speed up fluid loss.

Contaminants.

There are two broad categories of contaminant found in naturally occuring
water, chemical and biological.  Chemical contamination is mostly caused by
man as overspills from industry or agriculture but naturally occuring minerals
can be poisonous also e.g. Arsenic.  The biological category is more wide
ranging, contamination can result from animal or human fecal matter getting
into the watercourse or from waterborne diseases e.g. Giardia or Amoebic
Dysentery.  A third cause is contamination as an act of war or sabotage,
unprotected water supplies are prone to poisoning in time of war, it may be
by enemy action or as a result of Nuclear or Chemical combat in the water
catchment area such contamination is virtually irreversable and is really
beyond the scope of this article, the only sure method of obtaining pure
water is to have your own sure supply from a protected source.

Purification.

These are your options:-

Remove the pollutant from the water
Remove the water from the pollutants
Neutralise or destroy the pollutant.

There are  methods to affect these goals:-

Heat treatment
Filtering
Chemical treatment


HEAT TREATMENT

Heat treatment generally means boiling the water for at least 10 minutes, this
will generally kill waterborne diseases, but won't do anything about chemical
contamination and may actually concentrate the poisons. A much more effective
method of heat treatment is to use distillation, this involves boiling the
water away to steam and then condensing the vapour, it leaves behind any
solids, kills bacteria and gets rid of some chemical pollutants. Distillation
will also produce drinking water from urine & sea water.  To distill water
boil it in a covered container, with some form of tubing leading from it to
another cooller container where it will condense again into drinkable fluid.
One possible source of tubing is the frame of a rucksack.  Where conditions
allow you can use a solar still,  dig a hole about 3' acros and 1.5' deep
place a container in the centre to collect liquid, then cover the hole with a
sheet of plastic weighted in the middle with a small stone.  The sun will heat
the air below the plastic quicker than the outside air, causing vapour to
condense on the sheet and run down into your container, if feasible use a
piece of tubing, bamboo, reed or rucksack frame to draw off the liquid
without disturbing the still.

FILTERING

In its most basic form, the cloth bag or sock filled with charcoal through
which water is poured, filtering will remove debris and sand, silt or mud from
water, while some commercial filters claim to remove everything down to almost
viral level. I recommend that all filtered water also be boiled or chemically
treated to remove any possible residual contamination.  The combination of
both treatments will almost guarantee safe drinking water.

CHEMICAL TREATMENT

The various iodine and chlorine based treatments on the market will destroy
most waterborne bugs, with iodine being more effective in the removal of
Giardia.  Potassium Permanganate, used as a disinfectant generally can also be
used to treat water, add until the water turns light pink and let stand for
around an hour.  chemical treatment does not of course remove any suspended
matter, and to this end a simple filter can be rigged up.


Water is a most necessary resource for your survival plan now and practice
aquiring and purifying water or you may not live to face any more exotic
dangers




    Source: geocities.com/tominelpaso