I have equipped each vehicle with a collapsible toilet and other supporting supplies and the house has a portapotty I keep for the dry hunting camps.

For those folks who live in a urban or suburban area and have lost access to large quantities of water, out in the street you have two sewer systems. One is for storm runoff and the other is for waste. Collect your waste, pull the waste sewer manhole cover and deposit therein. Most manhole covers are stamped "SEWER." Just don't place the waste in the storm runoff sewer. It's a federal offense. You don't want to go to prison for sh_t!

Turbo, that's something I've never thought of (never lived much with sewer systems). Are there any long-term (say, 3 months or so) negative effects to doing something like this? Off the top of my head, I am thinking that without the toilet flushing, the waste will pile up and not move. Right? Wrong?

Sue

Right now?

For my wife and daughter, the a couple of 5 gallon buckets and a large bag of cat litter in my shop.

For me, the back yard..... (except for #2 then I'll use the bucket too...)

"... a couple of 5 gallon buckets and a large bag of cat litter..."

Be ready to do the emptying honors yourself. Even half a bucket of soaking wet clay cat litter is VERY heavy. (Lots of experience with used cat litter here...).

If you might not be home during the problem and the ladies have to handle it themselves, you might want to invest in a bag or two of stove pellets or recycled paper pellet cat litter. They both store well if you don't let them get wet. They're lighter. Even sawdust works just fine.

Sue

Thanks for the info Sue!!

After I responded to your question, I "Stumbled Upon" a saw dust composting toilet...

Very interesting....

A couple of helpful hints:

Avoid mixing urine with feces. Defecate in one spot and urinate in a separate container. Urine can be dumped in a garden or any absorbent soil with few consequences. Excluding urine lowers the weight of the waste by better than half, cuts the smell and makes handling a lot easier because your not dealing with a liquid.

Defecate into an absorbent material and add more of this material over top to control the smell. You can loosely place a top over this but make sure air can get to it. The material can be sawdust, peat moss (my favorite, cheap at any home center and it comes in easily handled compressed blocks), shredded newspaper, or leaves that have been run through a chipper, dried and bagged.

Avoid sealing your solid waste into a bag or container if at all possible. Feces that are suspended in a dry material and expose to air dry out and don't stink. After a day or two they smell more like rich soil. The types of bacteria that flourish in a sealed container, anaerobic, make the most pungent, lingering and nauseating smells imaginable. The term 'gag a maggot' comes to mind.

Don't douse your feces in bleach or formaldehyde (the funky blue chemical toilet stuff) or perfumes. It just makes it smell worse in the long run. Feces and perfume combined has much the same cloying sickly-sweet smell as a rotting body.

Starting with a five gallon bucket and a couple of inches of peat moss in the bottom you can plan on fitting about at least a dozen average deposits with a layer of absorbent material over each.

Have a couple of these setups. When full you should bury the contents. That option exclude by circumstances you can store the container for a few days for the contents to 'mellow' and all excess water to evaporate. Once completely dry, and assuming it is kept dry, it can be bagged and sealed for weeks without it becoming putrid. It should be buried when the opportunity presents itself. When you bury it remove the plastic bags no nature can get to it.

The difficulty of dealing with the human waste would actually be made more difficult at this time of year. Certain human waste is a lot more toxic and difficult to deal with than others depending on the individual. Consider for example the output from a Vegan compared to someone who has consumed a Meal Refusing to Exit (MRE) combined with the consumption of industrially farmed turkey, Brussels sprouts, Guinness and Christmas pudding.

Look what happened to Mr Creosote for example.

Sub zero temperatures may make it difficult to bury waste in the back garden so I reckon the next best thing would be to implement the advice from this old 1970s Protect and Survive video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJGEgTfecHc

Aside:

In planning for any such scenario, where dealing with "effluent in decomposition" may bring the average person to the point of vomiting/paralysis, consider stocking a couple of jars of "Vick's Vaporub," the generic version of which is called something like "medicated chest rub."

Tightly sealed, it will last forever; and when faced with an obscenely disgusting scent, a little under the nostrils will let people power through and get the job done. (Seem to recall there's a CSI angle, please add stories.)

Like when my cat decided to use a portion of the crawl space as a potty box. "What the heck died down there?" And guess who gets to don coveralls and go do cleanup? Yup, that's me. Pass the Vick's, baby, I'm going in.

/Aside.

I don't know if they still use Vicks, but that is exactly what and why it was used in morgues and during autopsies.

I just happened to be hanging around a dog show once, and overheard a woman with a German Shepherd say she put some Vicks on her dog's nose, just in case some fool brought a [censored] in season to the show (very distracting). Then she realized that soon after the Breed competition came his Utility Class... which included scent discrimination...

Sue

Vicks works pretty well to mask, deaden, the sense of smell and really helps to take the edge off the stink.

While it is not considered vital enough to make it in a BOB a decent supply of mentholated vapor rub, Vicks or generic, is a valuable addition to a larger and more comprehensive disaster kit.

Fact is people stink, literally, alive we emit foul vapors and materials. Dead, it only gets worse. And the worse the conditions get and the greater the numbers of people the worse the smell gets.

Mentholated vapor rub is good for calming dry coughs. And helping clear stuffy noses. And dealing with the eye-crossing pong that humans create in life and in death.