Water & food

Water storage

How much: plan 4 liters per person per day — 2–3 for drinking (more in heat or exertion, more for pregnant women and the sick) and the rest for cooking and basic hygiene. Store at least 14 days for the household. A family of four needs roughly 220–250 liters. It sounds like a lot; it is a stack of containers along one wall, and it is the cheapest life insurance you can buy.

• Containers: food-grade plastic water containers (10–25 L are practical to carry), or sealed bottled water bought by the case. Never reuse milk or juice bottles (residues feed bacteria) or anything that held chemicals.
• Filling your own: wash the container with soap, rinse, then sanitize: swirl a solution of 1 teaspoon of unscented bleach in 1 liter of water around all surfaces, rinse with clean water, fill from a safe tap, and cap tightly.
• Where: cool, dark, off the floor, away from fuel and chemicals (plastic breathes — it can absorb vapors). Heat and sunlight breed algae and taste problems, so no rooftop or car-boot long-term storage.
• Rotation: replace self-filled water every 6–12 months; respect dates on bottled water loosely (it stays safe long after, but tastes flat). Mark filling dates on containers with a marker.
• Flat-tasting stored water improves if poured between two jugs a few times — it re-absorbs air.
• Keep at least one full container in the car (rotated often — heat ruins it fast) and 3 liters per person in the go-bags.

Hidden water already in your home

• Water heater tank: 30–80 liters. Turn off its electricity/gas first, close the cold inlet, open a hot tap somewhere to break the vacuum, then drain from the valve at the tank's base. Let sediment-cloudy first liters run off. Purify before drinking. Skill card: full steps →
• Toilet cisterns (the tank on the wall, never the bowl): several liters each — fine after purification unless you use in-tank cleaning tablets (blue water = do not drink).
• Rooftop tank: many homes here have one — know its tap. Treat as untreated water: purify.
• Ice in the freezer, and the liquid in canned vegetables and fruit.
• Pipes: after mains failure, open the highest tap in the house, then drain the lowest — the pipework holds a few liters.
• Never drink: swimming pool or jacuzzi water (chemical load — usable for washing and flushing only), radiator or waterbed water, or anything smelling of fuel or chemicals — no purification below fixes chemical contamination.

Purification — boiling, chlorine, filtering

Purify any water that is not from a source you trust: after floods, mains breaks, conflict damage, or from tanks, wells, and pools of unknown history. Two steps: clarify (get the particles out), then disinfect (kill the microbes).

Step 1 — Clarify cloudy water

1. Let it stand in a container until sediment settles (hours help).
2. Pour or siphon the clearer top water through cloth — a tightly woven cotton cloth, several layers, or a coffee filter.
3. Repeat until visibly clear. Disinfection works poorly on cloudy water — particles shield microbes.

Step 2a — Boiling (the gold standard)

1. Bring water to a full rolling boil.
2. Keep it boiling for 1 full minute (3 minutes above 2,000 m altitude).
3. Cool covered. Store in clean, covered containers.

Boiling kills everything biological. Its only costs are fuel and time.

Step 2b — Household bleach (chlorine)

Use plain, unscented household bleach (sodium hypochlorite, 5–9%, the ordinary cheap kind — no perfumes, no “thick”, no added cleaners). Keep a dropper with the bottle.

1. Clarify first (above) — the “cloudy” dose is for water you cannot fully clarify.
2. Add the drops, stir or shake, and let stand 30 minutes.
3. Smell it: a faint chlorine smell is correct. No chlorine smell at all → repeat the dose and wait another 15–30 minutes. Still nothing → the bleach is dead (it loses strength within a year of opening); use another method.
4. Too strong a taste? Pour between containers a few times or let it stand open a few hours.

Step 2c — Purification tablets and filters

• Tablets (chlorine dioxide or similar): follow the packet exactly — dose and waiting time vary by brand. Light, cheap, perfect for go-bags.
• Portable filters (0.1–0.2 micron hollow-fiber, “Sawyer/LifeStraw” class): remove bacteria and parasites, not viruses. After floods or sewage contamination, filter then chlorinate or boil. Backflush per instructions; a dropped-and-frozen or cracked filter is dead.
• Sun (SODIS), when nothing else exists: fill clear PET bottles (≤2 L) with clarified water and lay them in full sun on a reflective or dark surface for 6+ hours of strong sun (2 days if heavily overcast). UV + heat kills most pathogens. Our climate is nearly ideal for this method.

Improvised sand-and-charcoal filter (clarifying only)

When water is truly filthy and you have no cloth fine enough, build a bottle filter. It clarifies — pulls out mud, grit, and some taste — but it does not make water safe. Always boil or chlorinate after.

Desalination note: none of the methods above remove salt. Do not drink seawater or brackish well water — it dehydrates you further. Only distillation (condensing steam) desalinates in a home setting, and yields are small.

Emergency food — what to store

Store what you actually eat, rotate it through normal cooking, and keep quantity math honest: roughly 2,000 kcal per adult per day. Two weeks for four people ≈ 112,000 kcal — a few full shelves, not a warehouse.

The backbone (long shelf life, no fridge)

• Grains & starches: rice, pasta, oats, flour, couscous, crackers. Sealed hard containers against insects; in a hot kitchen, buy smaller bags more often.
• Legumes: lentils (fast-cooking — precious when fuel is short), chickpeas, beans (canned beats dried when fuel matters).
• Canned proteins: tuna, sardines, chicken, beans, chickpeas. Cans are eaten cold straight from the can if needed — that is their superpower.
• Canned vegetables & fruit: tomatoes, corn, peas, fruit in juice. Count their liquid as water.
• Fats: cooking oil, ghee, tahini, peanut butter — calorie-dense and shelf-stable.
• Dense & ready: dates (the region's perfect emergency food), nuts, dried fruit, honey (never spoils), halva, energy bars.
• Milk: UHT cartons and milk powder.
• Flavor & morale: salt (store extra — it is also a preservative), sugar, tea, coffee, spices, stock cubes, lemon juice. Familiar flavors keep a stressed family eating.
• Special needs first: infant formula, baby food, elderly/soft diets, allergy-safe foods, pet food — these disappear from shops first in every crisis.

Storage rules

• Cool, dark, dry, off the floor. Heat is the enemy: a pantry at 35°C ages food several times faster than one at 20°C — use the coolest interior cupboard, never the garage.
• Rotate: first in, first out. New purchases go to the back. Eat from the emergency shelf routinely and replace.
• Check twice a year: dates, bulging or rusted cans (discard), insect signs in grains.
• Keep a manual can opener taped inside the pantry — and a second in the go-bag.

Cooking without power

1. Plan the order: first eat what will spoil (fridge), then the freezer as it thaws, then the pantry.
2. Camping gas stove is the workhorse — use it in a ventilated space: outdoors, on a balcony, or directly beside a wide-open window. Store spare canisters away from heat.
3. Charcoal or open fire: outdoors only, always. Never indoors, never in a garage, never in a doorway — carbon monoxide kills silently. Fire-building basics are in Shelter & Engineering.
4. Fuel-saving cooking: soak pasta/rice/lentils in advance to slash cooking time; use lids always; cut food small; “thermos cooking” — boil grains 2 minutes, then seal in a thermos or wrap the covered pot in blankets for 1–2 hours to finish on stored heat.
5. Solar cooking works well here: a car windscreen reflector folded around a black pot in a clear plastic bag, aimed at full sun, slow-cooks rice or stew in a few hours. Free fuel every sunny day.
6. No-cook meals: canned fish + crackers + canned corn; hummus from canned chickpeas + tahini + lemon; dates + nuts + UHT milk; peanut butter on bread. Keep a written list of your family's no-cook meals taped in the pantry so a tired mind doesn't have to invent dinner.
7. Conserve washing water: line plates with plastic wrap or use the pot as the plate; one-pot recipes only.

Food safety without refrigeration

Food poisoning during a crisis — with limited water, no toilet comfort, and no easy doctor — is a disaster multiplier. The rules are strict because the stakes are higher than a normal day.

The fridge and freezer in an outage

1. Keep doors closed. Every opening costs cold. An unopened fridge protects food for about 4 hours; a full freezer for about 48 hours (24 if half full).
2. Group frozen items together; they insulate each other. Move fridge milk/meat into the freezer's cold mass if the outage will be long.
3. After 4 hours unpowered, treat the fridge as a cupboard: perishables (meat, fish, dairy, cooked rice, cut fruit, eggs in hot climates) held above 4°C for more than 2 hours are unsafe — 1 hour when the room is above 32°C, which here in summer it will be.
4. Frozen food that still has ice crystals may be cooked and eaten (or refrozen with quality loss). Fully thawed and warm for over 1–2 hours → discard. Skill card: blackout-proofing the fridge →
5. Taste and smell prove nothing. The dangerous bacteria are invisible and flavorless. When in doubt, throw it out — a can of tuna is cheaper than dysentery.

Everyday rules without a fridge

• Cook only what will be eaten at that meal. In heat, leftovers are a gamble; if kept, reboil thoroughly (rolling boil, stirred) within a few hours, once at most.
• Cook thoroughly: steaming hot all the way through, juices run clear on poultry.
• Separate raw and cooked strictly — one cutting surface for raw meat, washed with soap after, or use canned protein and skip raw meat entirely when washing water is scarce.
• Wash or sanitize hands before cooking and eating — this rule prevents more illness than any other on the page (see hand hygiene).
• Keep food covered against flies always — flies move sewage to food.
• Opened cans: transfer contents to a covered container, eat within the day in heat.

Basic preservation without power

Skills for a long crisis, and satisfying to practice now. All rely on denying microbes water, warmth, or air.

• Sun-drying — the region's ancient method. Slice fruit, vegetables, or lean meat thin (5 mm); salt meat first (rub generously). Dry on racks or clean cloth in full sun and moving air, covered with muslin/mesh against flies, brought in at night. Done when leathery-to-brittle with no moist center (1–4 days). Store airtight, dark, cool.
• Salting fish and meat: heavily salt-rub, layer in salt in a covered container, drain the drawn liquid, then sun-dry. Rinse and soak before cooking. This is why the pantry stores extra salt.
• Pickling in vinegar: clean vegetables in a clean jar, cover completely with a boiled brine of 1 part vinegar (5%) : 1 part water + 1–2 tablespoons salt per liter. Keeps weeks to months in the cool and dark once sealed.
• Jam / fruit in sugar: boil fruit with roughly its weight in sugar until thick; pour boiling-hot into clean jars and seal. Sugar concentration is the preservative.
• Evaporative cooling (zeer pot): a small clay/porous pot inside a large one, the gap packed with constantly wet sand, a damp cloth on top, standing in shade and moving air. In dry heat this holds vegetables 10–15°C below air temperature for days. It needs dry air — it works poorly in humid coastal weather.
• What NOT to do: no home canning of meat or low-acid vegetables without a pressure canner (botulism risk), and nothing from bulging or hissing jars/cans — discard those unopened.