Emergency Preparedness

When There’s No Running Water

Something happened this weekend that made me do a lot of thinking. We had to turn off the water supply to our house and were without running water for 48 hours. I didn’t realize how much I took running water for granted until I didn’t have it. Here’s what happened.

A couple of weeks ago, I was finally able to order my baby chicks and garden seeds for the spring (lots of posts and pictures to come!). The chicks are set to arrive next week, and with this week being a very full week for us, I wanted to set up the brooder over the weekend. So, I took some time on Friday to clean up the supplies. I started with a kiddie pool (which will serve as my brooder) and was hosing it out and washing it up. The Equestrian came out to help, and I asked her to turn the water off for me. From my end of things, the hose stopped flowing, but The Equestrian came over to tell me that it wouldn’t turn off. Apparently she had just disconnected the hose.

I went to explore the problem and soon discovered that the hose hydrant had a broken valve. The only way to turn the water off at the hydrant was to turn the water off to the house. This meant that we couldn’t wash hands, clean dishes, flush toilets, take a shower, do a load of laundry, etc. I tried to see if I could fix the problem, but honestly, I just didn’t have the upper body strength to remove the hydrant and install a new one. It would have to wait until The Firefighter got home on Sunday.

Now, we weren’t completely without water. We had a bit of water in our Berkey ready to drink. I had just filled the horses’ troughs earlier in the day. The chickens were fine with their water supply. We had some bottled water we could use for drinking and washing hands. Not to mention we have a cistern that collects rain water. We weren’t going to die of thirst. We might get stinky, but we would be ok.

I had The Inventor get some buckets and fill them with water from the cistern. We used this for flushing toilets. I did tell the kids, “If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down.” (That was a phrase I heard as a kid in California during drought months.) We were going to be mindful of how much water we were using, now that we realized how precious a commodity it really is. I mean, we weren’t walking miles to fill our jugs with water (which I know is a reality for so many across the globe), but it was still more work that turning on a faucet. I also don’t think I realized how MUCH water we used daily. We found it easy to go through more than one 16 oz bottle just to wash our hands. It felt so wasteful. It was really a serious wake up call on several levels.

On Saturday, we went to a friend’s house to help her with some projects and accepted “payment” by way of shower access. When The Firefighter got home on Sunday, he was able to do the needed repair and we were back in business with running water. He really is my hero!

I am well aware of the fact that this weekend was a small blip, a hiccup if you will, in the journey of life. Some might even say it was a First World Problem. I couldn’t stop thinking about how many people across the globe don’t have access to clean, running water and have to put in a heck of a lot more sweat equity to obtaining water that we did over the weekend. It’s a humbling thought to be sure. I also couldn’t help but be grateful that we were ready for such an emergency.

We weathered this weekend without anything more than some minor inconveniences and are no worse for wear because of it. Now it’s time to restock the water supplies.

How would you fare with a no-water emergency in your home?

According to www.ready.gov, a basic emergency kit should include at least one gallon of water per person for at least three days for drinking and sanitation. This means a family of four, like ours, needs at least 12 gallons of water in case of emergency at the very least.