Idea for Easy Urban Water Storage?

Like anyone who has become concerned with thoughts of societal collapse, I've looked over a few books related to food preservation & storage.

The best that I've come across personally is Sharon Astyk's Independence Days, which has some interesting programs for developing household food stores, even on a strict budget, covering techniques like gardening, root cellars, dehydration, freezing, canning, etc.

I'd like to write a post that boils down some of Astyk's ideas on building up a pantry on a budget (she also includes considerations for people with mobility issues, or for those living in small spaces and apartments).

I think her advice could combine well with what I take to be a mainstay of J.M.Greer's thoughts on food storage: that dried grains and legumes are a commodity that can be produced, transported and stored on a very limited energy supply. They don't require refrigeration of course, and they can be shipped slowly, by rail and by boat.

My favorite recent demonstration of this point is by Erik Andrus of Boundbrook Farm in N.Y. state, who has established a rice and duck farm, along with a bakery, and has experimented with traditional transportation methods. He has used a horse and buggy to deliver flour to the bakery, and has developed a simple, easy-to-construct river barge in an effort to deliver his dried rice to customers.

Link: "A Sailing Farmer"

(I really like the idea of river boats transporting dried goods and produce. N.Y. state once had "towpaths" along the edge of certain rivers, where mules could tow a floating barge slowly along the waters.)

The basic carbohydrates & the complete proteins provided by these relatively affordable and shelf-stable foodstuffs could then be augmented with the vitamins & minerals of locally grown produce, fresh eggs or shavings of pastured meat, some sprouted seeds/grains, and whatever herbs and spices, oil/fats, and vinegars that might help to make these grain & bean bowls palatable.

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5 Gallon Storage Container

For the topic of this short post however: I've noticed that this and most other food preservation guides have a section on storing water, for drinking, cooking, washing, etc.

Astyk's book has guidelines for urban households to use 5-7 gallon water containers, adding a tsp of bleach for each gallon of water to prevent algae growth, rotating these containers out so that they are in cool storage for about a month before being used and refilled.

(FEMA apparently recommends a tsp of bleach to each quart of water for a year of storage time, but Astyk notes that water chlorinated to this level is beyond what most people would want to ingest.)

I'm glad for the information on decontaminating water storage jugs, but I also can't help but feel that this is far more work than the average person is able to put in towards storing water for emergency situations.

I've also noticed though, that this and other disaster preparation guides often mention that the water stored in our hot water tanks and in the water pipes of of our houses are our greatest asset in an emergency, to be drained out for drinking or washing water. Reading that repeatedly, the thought struck me, what if instead of storing water in separate containers, we could just increase the amount of water stored in the piping of our houses, that could be drained down in an emergency?

Coils of 3/4" Water Piping

At first I thought of increasing the size of water mains in a house to 1" or greater diameter pipe, but quickly realized that adds a minuscule amount of water storage to a household. Then I thought, maybe a person could buy some coils of water pipe, connect them together and tie them together on a pallet before their hot water tank, and maybe add a hose bibb at the base of the coils to drain out the water if needed?

That way one might also have some continual energy savings, having the water that is fed into their hot water tank being warmed to ambient room temperature before being heated. But even then, multiplying the cross-section area of the pipe by the length of the coil, I realized this wasn't that much of an increased volume of stored water.

Last I wondered, what if one was to install a ordinary, easily-obtainable hot water tank on their main water line? They could route their incoming water through the tank and then back into their water main. The tank wouldn't be connected to any fuel source to heat the water, it would just be used to store extra water.

So, in the event that the city water supply was interrupted, the household would have an extra 40 - 80 gallons of fresh water (depending on the size of the tank installed) sitting there ready to be used.

The tanks would be drawn from and continually replenished with adequately-chlorinated municipal water each time one opened a faucet in their house. That would be the equivalent of 8 - 16 five gallon water storage jugs, continually being filled and drawn from.

I mentioned this idea to a few people I work with, and I posted it to a "green wizardry" forum I participate in, to see if anyone could foresee any problems with this set-up. I heard from some rural members who had much larger amounts of water in storage tanks installed on their water supply, and people suggested a few possible improvements, but no one saw any problems with the idea.

The one concern I had with this idea was if bacteria/algae could build up in a tank that was being used for cold water storage. Of course, in urban settings, the tank would be filled with treated, chlorinated water, but in plumbing school we are continually reminded of legionella bacteria, which is common in water and normally harmless, but which can propagate in hot water tanks that are set to less than 140F, and cause a deadly form of pneumonia if inhaled from the vapors of a shower head.

https://www.cdc.gov/legionella/wmp/overview/growth-and-spread.html

The wikipedia page for legionella confirms that this bacteria dies within 32 minutes of 140F, and also states that the bacteria is dormant below 20C, which an insulated storage tank in a basement setting is not likely to warm above very often. (Plus, there must a lot of grey area regarding these temperature limits: if you were to wait 24 - 48 hours between using a shower, the hot water pipes between the heater and the shower must have descended below 140F to ambient room temperature for quite some time, but this normal occurrence must almost never cause illness in the general population.)

Since thinking of this idea, I've noted that there are a lot of buildings whose water supply comes from a cistern or plastic holding tank, that receives a intermittent supply of fresh drinking water, drawn from by pumps, without problems.

Hot water tanks also have drains that can be used to flush a tank, and I guess there would be nothing preventing an owner to installing an energy supply (to an electric tank, gas would be a lot more cumbersome.) to heat up the tank, killing bacteria before flushing. Or maybe a UV unit before or after would be a good idea. I doubt this would be necessary but nonetheless, I would like to find an expert in water supply to give the OK to this idea, before promoting it unreservedly.

I also note that there are almost always used hot water tanks on kijiji for less than $200, probably from people upgrading to larger tanks or to instant hot water systems. I have to imagine that these tanks could last a long time, being not subjected to the constant expansion and contraction cycle of hot water production. (Of course there are likely dedicated water storage tanks that one could buy, I was using hot water tanks for this example as they are easy to obtain.)

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One more technical note for this set up - water mains being lower than lower than much of the piping in a house, with a lack of pressure some the water in your house could drain or be siphoned back out of your house. To prevent that, probably best to install some sort of check valve/backflow preventer just after your water meter.

Last, adding a check valve on your water main creates a closed system, and that can cause the relief valve on your hot water tank continually discharge water as cold water in the tank expands as it's heated. This requires a small expansion tank to be installed to handle the changes in pressure.

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Reading more about water usage, that the normal daily allotment of water is 60 U.S. gallons of water per person per day, all this trouble and expense to store 40 - 80 gallons of fresh water seems pretty futile.

But, of course, in an emergency situation, we do not have to be so profligate in our use of water. For survival, the U.S. government recommends 3/4 of a gallon for an active person per day. So, without any water usage for washing or cooking, a small 40 gallon tank could supply one person for 53 days, or 2 people for 26 days, etc. (And of course we also have our actual hot water tank storage, that could supply small amounts of water for washing and cooking.)

One drawback to this method of water storage would be if the water supply was somehow contaminated. Unless you were somehow aware of the possible contamination beforehand and closed off the valve on your water supply before the pollutants reached your home, your water stores would become contaminated. Jugs filled before the contamination would of course be sitting there, unaffected.

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In general, I haven't really read about or thought through the scenarios where municipal water might be disrupted. I'm thinking generally of my own city here, and things obviously vary a lot depending on your location. Is this disruption caused by damage to an aqueduct or to aquifer infrastructure, so that water cannot reach your city or town, or is it a power issue, such that the city can't provide the pressure to get the water to our dwellings? I imagine that even in a general power outage, cities have ways of generating backup power to keep the water and sewer systems working.

If it were a case of some larger societal breakdown, where infrastructure was not being operated or maintained for whatever reason, a few gallons of extra water storage might not be that much help.

United States of Decay

And I'm not trying at all to promote the idea that a sudden collapse of society is close at hand. You never know, I suppose, but my own guess is that things like climate change, increasing energy costs, resource scarcity, economic troubles are bringing the industrial mode of civilization into decline. To the person on the ground I think this is probably going to feel like a gradual decay and a rising tide of problems to deal with, overall a much slower process than the common idea of waking up to a sudden apocalypse one morning. (However, punctuated crises like those occuring in Venezuela at the moment can feel very much like a total collapse for the people living through them.)

Still, so long as one doesn't take it too literally, the idea of "preparing for collapse" can be useful. I even think its valuable just to try to think through scenarios like this in as much detail as you can: even if nothing like you're envisaging is going to come to pass where you are living, you are making yourself much more conscious of the systems that are supporting your community, the supplies of food and water, the landfills, sewers, and storm drains, the energy and transportation networks.

I think that it's important to consider these things from a community viewpoint as well. One person building up a pantry of (for example) a few bags of white rice and dried lentils, some canned tuna and soup, some dehydrated vegetables, and some drinking water, doesn't do that much for a city running low on supplies. But if a good percentage of a city's residents take up a practice like this, those kilograms of stored food and gallons of water can be multiplied by many thousands, and can be counted along with the grocery store inventories to help weather over a period of emergency.

And the more people in all the various communities who are engaging with and thinking through issues like these, the more resilient we will be, however the problems of our times come to affect our daily lives.