Preparations

[Jon Lemon]

Appalachia seems a little risky to me, there are a *lot* of hill people as it is. It's urban wilderness.

[Harrison]

Originally Posted by Jon Lemon [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Appalachia seems a little risky to me, there are a *lot* of hill people as it is. It's urban wilderness.

Not the Virginia/mid-southern stretch where those are. Border of NH/MA/ME depending on various factors of course.

I've thought of staying near a coast line, too. (10ish miles inland, to move in and out at will for the summer. Nothing beats the plentiful food pulled from the ocean.)

[Uthgaard]

Water from a natural source isn't always safe. If it exists in nature, something has already found a way to live there. You might think hot springs around yellowstone would be pretty ideal since that essentially boils your water for you. But then you get introduced to the minor celebrity prokaryote thermus aquaticus.

I posted a quick rundown of water purification a while back in a previous exposé of HBB thread 2pidity. (It seems to be a regular occurence)

Originally Posted by Uthgaard [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Aside from this, water purification is simple and accessible to anyone. A fully effective water filter can be made from bituminous and anthracite coal, sand, plastic, garnet and gravel. Same accessible stuff that's in military water filters. Chlorine and citric acid will neutralize any microbes and the pH. Reverse osmosis is the only part that might seem a little tricky, but guess what? A $50 pool filter has the same RO element and the pump.

You can get water from anywhere. Ponds and lakes are surface representations of the water table (that's how far down you have to go to get water). If you're 25 miles from water, you can take a topographic map, find the water gradient from the difference in elevation between the nearest pools, dig about that far down. As long as it doesn't smell like sulfur, you've got a well. If it does, move about 10 yards and try again.

Simple stuff. Now no one from p99 should ever die of thirst.

[jarshale]

Hopefully I would be smart enough to move to the philipines before this all goes down, where my family owns a good bit of land

[burkemi5]

occupy fallout

[Uthgaard]

[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Civilization has a tendency to flock to natural water sources. People are going to go to water, not to food. If you can go to food, and draw your own water from the earth, you're ahead of the game.

Also, if you intend to "develop a vaccine" to put in a water supply in bulk, you'll observe how quickly it becomes ineffective. There are probably hundreds of true vaccines. All of them are derived from nature. As a result of that, every vaccine that exists, has a complementary resistance that has been evolved as well.

Why? Because we aren't at the point in molecular biology where we can create truly effective vaccines yet. We're just borrowing from the arms race between fungi and bacteria.

[Jon Lemon]

lol thats not what a vaccine is

of course if you put a selective agent into the water supply itself it will fail, wots evolution

[Uthgaard]

That's why I put it in quotes. I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. You're talking about putting something in the water supply. I can only assume you meant antibiotics.

[Jon Lemon]

Originally Posted by Uthgaard [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

You're talking about putting something in the water supply.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine"]that makes no sense and no[/URL]

• iodine used as attenuating agent
• some terrible carcinogen used as adjuvant because who really cares in this situation

You figure the rest.


Condescension takes better when you don't get lost at the word "vaccine" [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[Hasbinbad]

My safe water procedure:

1.) Mechanical Filtration: Varies in effectiveness depending on the filter diameter. This should never be your only method of making water safe, and really only helps the aesthetics of the situation, and the water only looks cleaner. This can be accomplished using any funneling system, but it is useful to have a tube of some sort that you can pack with filter material (coffee filters, cloth, charcoal bits or bits of burned wood, moss, leaves, etc., depending on your level of access).

2.) Disinfection: A couple drops of bleach should do the trick. Bleach kills organisms and destroys viruses. The chlorine is also "used" in the process, so there is a built-in rough metric for determining if there has been enough bleach added. Add a few drops, wait 30 minutes, smell. If you can't smell any bleach, add a few more drops. Repeat until you can detect any small amount of bleachy smell after 30 minute wait periods.

Mechanical filtration with professional water filters usually only filter organisms, unless they specifically say they filter viruses as well (viruses are MUCH smaller than organisms). Boiling can also leave viruses intact, but tends to kill all but the most crafty organisms (as Uthgaard pointed out). As far as drinking water without any kind of treatment, try to get as close to the source spring as possible. No spring source is 100% guaranteed safe to drink, but as you get above waterfalls and other natural barriers to wildlife, there is less chance for levels of contamination likely to cause illness.