Where do you find potable water during a flood?
One choice - I think - is to use transpiration bags over growing vegetation. It seems to me that this would work when: the weather is hot; there is sunshine; you had the right equipment.
Has anyone out there had any experience with transpiration bags under these circumstances?

Opinions?

I won't get flooded where I live in the high desert, so I don't really have a way to test this!

If you prepare ahead of time...

http://www.mywatersafe.com/

LeonP... I live in hurricane country so I store around 12gal in dedicated spigoted containers year round...change out the water at the beginning of the season, with a couple of drops of Clorox for good measure...for more immediate threat (I have a single bath so don't use something like the water safe which is a good idea for a multi bath home) I use a new 33gallon plastic trash can in my bath tub/shower... fill it for bathing/flushing as I can still use the drain in the tub... dedicated lawn sprayer painted black for shower (electric hot water heater) ...I place an additional plastic trash can to catch rainwater from the eaves just outside my rear steps...I have a couple of Sawyer/Sweetwater filter bottles available and a supply of Clorox/tincture of iodine as well as some Katadyn chlorine di oxide tabs if necessary

I've been fooling around with a 5gal bucket solar desal apparatus this summer, but about 350ml per day is my yield so far... when I get to 500ml will do a write up

No experience, but I'll make up for that with lots and lots of opinions...

My gut feeling is that they're as practical as boiling water in a sheet of paper (folded into a cup). Scientifically, the principle behind those ideas is sound, and they can be demonstrated to work. But the usefulness and practical output is so limited it isn't worth the effort except perhaps under a very limited set of circumstances.


That is my theory, anyway. I will bow to and concur to anyone that has successfully been able to produce, say, one gallon per person per day. Preferably two gallons.


Cody Lundin writes somewhere that he has made his students try this and other exotic methods (solar still etc) in the Arizona climate. Measuring the output and the water consumption, he claims those methods are sorely inadequate, at least in his climate.

In my emergency water supplies. I have at least a week of drinking and cooking water stored at all times.

Once that runs out, if you have the means to first filter out particulates and then boil the water, that's the best way...as long as the water isn't contaminated with chemicals. I have a camp stove with a number of small propane bottles for that.

Transpiration bags work but produce a very small amount of water.

Don't have experience with transpiration bags. During a flood, if no stored water were available, I'd say a Berkey filter would be your best bet. Pretty sure it filters out lots of stuff including VOC's. Pre-filter the flood water as much as possible first though.

I remember reading about this method years and years ago in a old survival book. Next time I was out in the bush, I gave this a very concerted effort and found that it was vastly overrated...There are much better and more reliable methods of collecting water.

In the case of a flood...which you usually know is coming days before, the best water collection method is to simply prepare ahead of time by storing the water on high ground before it is too late. Of course that nicely stored water on high ground might as well be on the moon if you do not evac and get stuck in the flood..

As others have mentioned, a quality water filtration system is a good investment.

Some friends & I,tried transpiration bags some many yrs. ago,Out in Mojave/Death Valley area,with very Poor results.We also made solar stills,& they showed some promise,Had we found some plants with a bit more moisture,1 of 4 of us, would probably be able to survive,for a time anyhow.I remember drinking more than a Qt. of water,Digging my hole for the still!None of us had pee'd in the holes either,which would have increased our gathered amounts of water.I recall we totaled around a 1/2 Pt.of water,the next morning!The Transpiration bags had enough in each,to Possibly get your lips wet,If That!It had gotten Windy overnight,& It was Hot at 2AM,So that was a Big Factor!

Some years ago, during an archaeological project in Canyon de Chelly, we were forced to subsist on flood water which was "too thick to drink and too thin to plow." We would collect a quantity in a basin and let it settle overnight (at least), decant the upper clear fluid, and then boil. Once we established our system, it worked just fine, with no problems or illness.

We knew we had to deal with waste from both humans and livestock, but chemical contamination was trivial. This would not be the case in many areas currently.

Has anyone tried useing a solar still, as suplied in liferafts, to produce drinking water in/after a flood ?
These are intended to float in the sea attached to the raft by a cord.
It would seem that they would work as well if floated in a swiming pool or ornamental lake.
After a flood there should be plenty of water in pools etc that has been mixed with floodwater and could be rendered safe by distilation.

The original question here was "...find potable water during a flood?"

FLOOD. That means lots of water saturating the soil, not the Mohave in summer.

While sunlight is necessary for transpiration, so is moisture in the soil. If there isn't much moisture in the soil, you aren't likely to get a lot of transpiration. But in the case of flooding, the results could be far different.

That could be an interesting experiment. I may have to do something about that.

The best part of transpiration under flood conditions is that the water is clean and ready to drink (assuming you didn't use toxic trees).

Although collecting water from rainfall from a clean surface would be simpler.

Edited to add: Someone did an experiment at Practical Survivor in a non-desert situation, in the sun, and got half a cup of water from one bag in one day. But would that have increased after a flood, from saturated soil?

Sue

Here is some info from the Survival Mom site about collecting water during/after a flood.

Survival expert Peter Kummerfeldt says, "It is not uncommon to find two or three cups of water, and sometimes much more, has accumulated over a six-to-eight hour daylight period..."

Sue