Your emergency water supply may save your life, so don’t get sucked in by these myths! From our friends at Gray Wolf Survival...

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A backyard pool means you are set with a long term water supply.

I would recommend NOT using pool water for long term drinking purposes. Many of the chemicals such as algaecides that are used to keep the water clear are not safe for general human consumption.

Just because you can safely ingest small amounts doesn’t mean it is healthy in larger quantities! Nothing short of distilling that water will remove those chemicals. (No, boiling won’t work.)

In addition, sunlight denatures the chlorine. Even covered with a tarp or pool cover, within a week or two your pool’s chlorine levels will be at or close to 0 ppm. And while you might have spare chlorine on hand to continue to mix, if you have no electric power to run the pumps, filtration, and agitation, then its effectiveness will be diminished because it is not dispersed adequately throughout the pool.

And finally, what is your water plan if you are forced to leave your residence and thereby leave your pool? In essence, within just a short time, water within pools could and should be considered questionable. The risks skyrocket if it is not a pool that you personally treated.

You can use Pool Shock to treat water for drinking

Ok…well this is not a complete fallacy. But it isn’t as simple as you might think. Calcium hypochlorite, the main ingredient of “pool shock”, is a great way to purify water when used correctly. Refer back to the PDF file link I provided for details on how to do this.

The problem is that because pool shock contains calcium hypochlorite, folks think they can buy some at Wally World and be set. Nope.

Most pool shock is OK in small doses. But commercial “Pool Shocks” out there are not just calcium hypochlorite. They have ‘other ingredients’ in them that could seriously hurt or kill a normal person after prolonged consumption.

Pool shock uses things like stabilizers, algaecides, and bacterostats to help keep pool water clear. Because pool shock is not considered a food item, they are not required to tell you this.

The active chemicals are not always stable, pure, and certainly not for ingestion. Some of what is sold at pool supplies stores even says on the packaging “not intended for water purification”.

This doesn’t mean you cannot use calcium hypochlorite to purify water.

If you can find a chemical supply store that sells pure calcium hypochlorite, great. (After some research, I was able to find a few online sites that offered it for sale.)

Otherwise, only use HTH Pool Shock that does not have any algaecides or fungicides. Ingredients should read calcium hypochlorite and INERT ingredients. Use a brand with at least 78% CH. The higher the CH amount, the better!

Boiling water for 1 minute will make it 100% safe to drink

While it is true that boiling water will kill most pathogens, it won’t kill ALL of them. For example, some forms of  botulism must be heated to temps greater than 212°F to be killed, and you cannot heat water past its boiling point of 212 °F. (Unless you use a pressure cooker.)

Now these cases are extremely rare, but it is something you should be aware of.

In addition, the boiling point of water changes based upon your elevation. The boiling point of water drops at higher elevations. So depending upon where you are at, you may need to boil your water for longer than a minute.

Water temperatures above 158 °F will kill most pathogens within 30 minutes and above 185 °F within 5 minutes.

Finally, and most importantly, boiling will not remove chemicals that have boiling points above 212 °F, Heavy metal contamination will not be removed via boiling either. (Hence you should never drink flood water.)

My dog (pet) is drinking it so it must be OK 

I’ve seen people post this on prepper sites before. And it is simply NOT true. Animals and humans immune systems, while fairly similar, are still different in many ways.

Each can ingest things that the other cannot – dogs should not eat chocolate, for example. And we humans (hopefully) don’t eat out of the cat box or drink out of the toilet.

I won’t go into a whole molecular biology case study, but I will say that we humans are much more susceptible to a whole range of diseases than other mammals.

For example, scientists are finding out that diseases such as HIV and Hepatitis B don’t affect primates the way that they affect humans. So obviously parasites and viruses will effect dogs and cats differently than humans.

Every day we ingest a huge amount of bacteria. This is a good thing as it helps us to develop immunities to many other pathogens. But animals ingest WAY MORE bacteria than humans.

So dogs are generally not as susceptible to things like E. coli, giardia, and cryptosporidium. This is good example of why Montezuma’s revenge hits tourists much worse than the locals….ie the locals have built up a tolerance to many of the local impurities in their water.

But animals can still get these and other parasites/viruses in their system from water. So your water plan should also incorporate clean water for all of your pets.

In an emergency you can drink your own urine

UGH!! I think I hate this one the most. Urine is about 90-95 percent water, but the remaining 5-10 percent is not very good for you—that’s why your body is getting rid of it. It carries excess electrolytes, such as sodium and potassium.

Urine also carries small traces of excess toxins in the form of acids from your kidney, but you’d need to drink a lot for that to do damage.

Some electrolytes are good as they enable some of our cells to conduct electricity. But too much sodium draws water out of your cells, dehydrating you.  (And too much potassium leads to a heart attack.)

So with urine, you are putting sodium back into your system. This can only dehydrate you further. Basically, it is comparable to drinking ocean water.

Now you can prepare you emergency water supply with more confidene! To see more survival tips, check out Gray Wolf Survival.

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