All of the preparation for long-term survival will be worthless without a renewable supply of drinking water. In a moderate climate, without heavy exertion, you need maybe two quarts of water a day, plus what is contained in your food. If you are eating dried foods, living in a hot climate or are working hard, you will need more, a lot more.
Where are you going to get water? If you are on a municipal supply, provided that it is gravity-fed from an aquifer, you may be OK for awhile. If the municipal water supply is pumped to a tower to provide pressure, when the pumps shut down, so will the water. If you live in an arid climate, a fall of civilization, even short-term, could lead to running out of water. If your water comes from a private well, when the power goes out, so will your water.
Streams may be very dangerous. Count on the risk of being ambushed by two-legged predators. Some family or compound a few miles upstream may have hit on the idea of erecting a privy over the stream, which means that the water downstream will be a sewer. Even if they don't, if an animal dies in the stream, the water will be contaminated. Those big fences around reservoirs are not to keep terrorists out, but to keep deer and other animals out.[1] Do you have the capability to do some purification of water and what happens when you run out of bleach or your reverse-osmosis gizmo breaks down?
Maybe you might want to dig a well. How far down is the local water table? Can you dig a well to it and if you can, are you able to line the well to keep dirt out of the water? Will you be able to dig the well without it caving in on you?
Think it out, use your brains. If you are going to go the survivalist route, you have to plan for every freaking eventuality and need. One error or omission is all it takes to kill you.
[1] Any poison a terrorist could bring that would be potent enough to contaminate an entire reservoir would be so deadly that the terrorist would be killed instantly as soon as he tried to pour it in.
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My land has a well that my grandfather and father dug by hand. A concrete culvert keeps the dirt out. Water can be drawn up from it via a bucket on the end of a rope -- yes, when I was a child we did that during power outages (every time the weather turned stormy, often in rural Louisiana, the power went out as trees fell onto the lines). The sewer is a septic tank and field line that requires no power to operate and, if necessary, the septic tank could be cleaned out by hand with a bucket when it gets full of muck (though that'd be a smelly nasty job). If the well runs dry, there is a perennial spring at the far back of the property that is a reliable water source year round, just rather inconvenient to get to. And, more importantly, I am related to everybody whose property adjoins mine and a sizable number of people in the local area. If TEOTWAWKI ever happened, we would devolve to a clan structure like in Somalia, and living in the midst of my kinfolk means I have instant access to that sort of clan structure. In the absence of civilization, it is the organized who survive, and family is the most basic fundamental level of organization.
That said, I have absolutely no -- zero -- desire to go back to that kind of lifestyle. I prefer civilization -- you don't know how great hot showers are unless you grew up without them. The sort of life my grandparents had, that my mother had until she reached high school age and electricity came to the rural area where she was raised, was pretty harsh and uncomfortable. My grandmother showed me a large iron object with a wooden handle and described how they would place this on top of the wood stove in the living room and let it heat up, then swiftly run to the bedroom and toss it under the covers to try to warm the bed before they went to bed. Because, of course, there was no heat in the bedrooms and the wood stove would be tamped down for the night so that the coals could be used to restart the fire in the morning, matches being rare and expensive things and flint and steel woefully unreliable at starting fires. You can survive that sort of life, obviously. But there's no reason you should have to.
- Badtux the Civilized Penguin
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