In this Emergency Water Containers Review, we will look at how to store your emergency water supply and we will take a brief look at how to purify water when your emergency supply runs out.
How much water per person per day will you need to survive? Emergency Preparedness Experts recommend you store 14 gallons for each person in your family. What kind of emergency water containers will you use?
I want my Water storage containers to be made of food-grade plastic and I want them to stack efficiently to minimize storage space. The 5 gallon Jerry Can, when filled with water, will weigh nearly 50 pounds. You are not going to lug a five-gallon Jerry Can very far and they don’t stack well.
When the power goes off our Board of Water Supply cannot pump water to their tanks. Our tanks will run dry. The last time we had a hurricane it took a week to restore electricity to the Water Company. That was a category 1 storm with relatively minor damage. Emergency Preparedness Experts recommend storing a gallon of water per person per day. How much water you will need to store depends on your situation. If you can drive out of the devastation area you may only need water for three days. If you live where you cannot relocate you will need water for at least two weeks and much more if you live where the power utility is fragile.
I plan on having enough water for my family of 3 for two weeks. Three gallons per day for 14 days is 42 gallons. I use collapsible jugs [link to source] and will fill them when a hurricane is forecast to hit my home. Collapsed they take about 3 cubic feet of space in our storage area. 42 gallons of water weighs approximately 350 pounds, so make sure you store it in a secure location. Securing anything will be difficult to do when faced with the kind of storm the Bahamas recently experienced.
They build storm cellars in the mid-west for a reason. A tornado will scatter you and your supplies all over the county.
I don’t want my water jugs to be made from cheap China plastic. I want to be sure my food and water containers are made of food-grade materials and are BPA free.
The best containers I have found are made by WaterBrick International. They are rugged, rectangular, and stack like Lego’s. These containers are pricey, but if space is an issue, you cannot get a better product. [Check out prices on Amazon]
I can’t store enough water for an extended outage. I plan to outfit my storage with WaterBricks, But my highest priority is two water bricks I will use for water purification. I will put polluted water in the brown WaterBrick and pump filtered water through a Seychelle Pump 2 Pocket Pump into a blue WaterBrick containing potable water.
The Seychelle Filter is the only filter I could find that removes heavy metals. That is important if you are dealing with polluted floodwater.
I’ll review water purification in more depth in another post.