3 Ways to always get water

Categories: How To, Survival

(from Discovery)

3 Ways to always get water

Without a doubt, water is the # 1 priority for survival. If you have plenty of it, great, it’s still the most important thing in a non-combat situation as dehydration kills, quickly. So always carry a bottle of water.

Most of us carry water. But what to do when it runs out and there are none of the usual sources for resupply? First, let’s talk about needs. The body has 5 liters of blood. Most soldiers know, once you get just a few percent dehydrated, functions begin to deteriorate. Most combat soldiers know, you can bleed out in 60 seconds and be unconscious from blood loss alone in 10 seconds. The same for dehydration, at 5% we get weak, at 10% your overall functions deteriorate and at 15% dehydrated we fall unconscious. Left on our own, we will not likely recover and death ensues.

The thing is, most of us do not stay fully hydrated at all times. That means we all are functioning at some level of dehydration at any given moment and if something dramatic happens that thrusts us into a survival mode, it likely sent us a little further into dehydration and another step closer to death. So, how do we fight back? Get water!

1) NATURAL

The first way to always be able to get water is to get natural water from your environment.

AIR– Rain Water. This is naturally filtered and pure from the sky. The trick is having a clean way to catch it and something to store. You can drink it as it lands in you mouth, make a funnel to catch if from leaves, or use your T-shirt to soak it up and squeeze into mouth. Snow counts here, too but that is easier to scoop up from the ground. In a pinch, you can melt ice in a plastic bag against your torso if you’re working hard or simply eat snow. The trick to this is to not eat snow when your cold and sitting still. If your on the move and working up a sweat, the snow will rehydrate you and cool your body temp, saving you more water! And it’s usually safe straight, just scrap the top layer off and eat the middle layers. Avoid yellow snow…

LAND– Rivers, Streams, Lakes and the like. You can also use snow and ice. The key here is to make them safe. The 3 Ways to Treat Water are:

• FIRE- The safest way is to boil. You only need to hit a rolling boil.

It’s a myth to boil a few minutes. Water boils at 212 Degrees Fahrenheit (100 Celsius) and all pathogens that are harmful to man die at 163 Degrees. And you can boil water in your plastic bottle.

• TREAT- Chemicals or UV rays are very easy and effective. If all else fails the Sun’s UV’s can treat water in your clear plastic water bottle in a way called SODIS or make an old fashioned solar still.

• FILTER- You can use your store bought filters, or make one with a sock and soil and charcoal, or you can dig a hole in the soil next to the water source and let the ground function as your natural filter.

2) SEEK–  When there is no natural water from the air or land, seek it out in nature’s hiding places. Rock crevices, Forks in tree branches, pools in depressions, Squeeze out moss, or dig into mud holes.  Go low, look in shady areas and follow natural line of drift to find pockets of moisture.

• MAN MADE – In the Urban environment, there is a plethora of places to look for water, but let’s say something major happened and the usual suspects are no longer viable. Here are some areas where you can seek water in man-made terrain:
• Gold Courses
• Parks
• Water Fountains
• Roof tops
• Reservoirs
• And indoors, most folks have water in their water heater tanks and in their toilet bowl tanks, which are perfectly safe to drink as is.

3) RECYCLE – Here’s the one everyone loves to hate and is the most misunderstood- URINE DRINKING. I throw this one in for fun and provocation of thought and discussion.

Facts:

• Unlike Feces, urine is STERILE.

That means it is completely clean.

• The human body is not perfect. It does not filter our blood perfectly
• That means most of our urine is mostly pure water with minimal waste products (ON THE FIRST PASS.)
• People have been drinking urine for health purposes for millennia
• Some people today pay to drink pure urine for medicinal purposes
• Some people drink urine for Fetishes
• All of them live…

Myth:

Drinking Urine Kills.

Truth:

Drinking Same Urine, repeatedly over and over can kill.

Here’s how this works. If you’re in a situation and you have absolutely ZERO Water, say, a desert. And immediately before your plane crashed in the desert, you were completely hydrated. You now have been on the ground an hour or two and need to micturate (Urinate).  Your first pass of urine will be mostly pure water and the amount of waste product in it will be negligible to your body if you drank it.

Now, you can’t store it, it will begin to build up bacteria very quickly once it makes contact with the air. You can store it and try to distill with fire or sun, but that is a tricky matter for another time. You can waste it, or drink it. If you drink your own urine on the first pass, no harm will come to you, at all, period. This is medical science.

HOWEVER, where the myth becomes true, is when folks drink their own urine over and over. Example, a sailor is at sea, gets dehydrated and keeps recycling his own urine. After the 2^nd, 3^rd and even 4^th pass, the waste products become so concentrated that your kidneys can not process the waste, they become obstructed and renal failure ensues which absolutely leads to death.

So, you can imagine why the old wives tale became gospel. In the absence of understanding the bio-physiology of nephrological function. In short, it became easier to just teach folks, drinking urine kills, rather than try to teach folks how to use it and when not to use it.

For our purposes, of hard core survival and finding water anywhere, if you don’t have it on you, you have it in you. If ya’ gotta go, don’t let it go, at least not the first time. It may mean the difference between getting back or dropping dead. I think everyone will agree, we’d rather skip that step. So, stay hydrated, always carry water and learn how to extract it in your environment and how to make it safe. Stay thirsty my friends!

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