Water, Water, Water

[cornholioprime]

With the breakdown of society and a ready supply of sanitary water and goods, how are PCs handling it?
Are they using water filtration systems? If so, how long until you run out of filters and then what do you do? Bottled water only goes so far and boiling water is a time consuming process.
Ideas?

Actuvated Charcoal....of which there is PLENTY, if you know where to look and how to "activate" it.

(It's a fairly easy process, but it would probably require a static base of operations to produce it; I doubt that someone could make it "out in the field" but I'm not at all sure.

Another method might be the use of Iodine Tablets (we used to have them as part of our kit when I was serving).

[Thinyser]

Short term or long term?

Short term once bottled water is not available you can harvest water from toilet tanks, water heaters and general plumbing by draining it at the lowest point. Depending on how long its been sitting in the pipes or tanks you may still want to boil it but in a pinch its probably still your safest bet if you need to hydrate and cannot take time to boil.

Long term 20 drops of chlorine bleach and 30 minutes waiting will chemically pasteurize water so that its safe to drink. It takes some time but you can hide or take it with you while the bleach does its thing where you cant hike or hide with a pot of water on to boil. A gallon of bleach used for just this will give you potable drinking water for a year or more. Filter it through sand and a charcoal filter (if you can find or make one) before you add the bleach and you will have some pretty clean and clear and hopefully good tasting water too.

As stated Iodine tablets are another way to get by.

Boiling wont take out the sediment or other flavorful (but now boiled dead) biological matter. Filtering it through sand and charcoal will take out said sediment and tasty bits but wont sterilize it. Both filtering it then boiling it will give you both clean and safe water. Of course mountain streams are clear and taste fine but can harbor nasty stuff anyhow so you can skip the filter but you do want to boil (or chemically treat).

Longest term I'd set up a solar powered ozone & UV purification system with a wind mill pump to raise the water to a elevated storage tank. Have the windmill pump send the water through a filter of fine sand and active charcoal (if you can get enough for a large scale application). The water is then pulled by gravity through the filter and into a large plastic storage tank that is elevated on stilts. Ozone is generated by solar energy and high voltage discharges and is pumped via small electric fishtank pumps into the tank chemically sterilizing the water. Then as the water flows out of the tank it passes through a clear tube that is surrounded by antimicrobial UV lamps (also solar powered) as a final assurance that anything that was in it is now dead.

Alternately a large solar still that simply evaporates off pure water to be condensed and collected in a cooling tube that then drains into a storage tank and preserved in its sterility by ozone generated in the same manner as above would be even more preferable to the filter.

[Oberoth]

Triple A Thinyser!

I would opt for a home still myself. This sort of thing can be made in almost any home with some ingenuity and some basic hand tools. So it can be easily made in the field if you have at least a day to work on/use it. It can be any size too. Small one man units would fit in a back pack or duffel. The power source would depend on your personal circumstances, but I think it could be doable in most cases.

Camp stoves would last a little while and you could probably go a few months on an average BBQ propane tank (If you used it for water only). Not to mention that many homes will still have gas pressure so you could easily set this up in a kitchen. You could even make ethanol with a few ingredients at the same time as you make your water (bc water and fuel evaporate at different temps). They can be one hundred percent solar if designed properly as well.

[azazel1024]

Chlorine bleach works wonders if there isn't much in the way of chemical contamination. A 1 gallon bottle of bleach can treat something like 1,000+ gallons of water. Idiodine tablets are okay, but again won't remove contaminants and have the downside that they will not kill Crypto, Chlorine will (takes about 30 minutes to treat with Chlorine or Iodine for most stuff, but Chlorine takes 2hrs to treat water to kill Crypto, nothing else other than reverse osmosis to remove it, or UV to inactivate it will kill Crypto).

solar powered backpacking UV water treatment (steripen) will also work great, so long as the water is clear.

To make a filter, depending on what you need to filter, you can use a gallon jug with the bottom cut off. Cover the exit with clean cloth, place sand in the bottom and then small stones on top. That will filter larger particulates out and just treat the water for virus/bacteria with a steripen or cholorine/iodine once filtered. To get chemicals add activated charcoal, which isn't too hard to make if you can make a campfire and know the know how on how to make it.

[Hound]

One of the campaign ideas I came up with centered around water towers. In small towns you could havwe survivor camps clustering around them and a campaign idea would be say a neighboring Death Priest trying to get control OR the PCs wresting control of it to free a community.

I always thought it would be really evil for a death priest to drop a crawler into a water Tower to poison the water .....

[azazel1024]

One issue with them is it requires the water pumps to still be active. Those suckers use a lot of juice, so a little generator is not going to be able to power one. Of course they'd retain a lot of water, but the smaller ones are going to provide much water for a larger survivor group.

Water tower volumes vary. A building water tower is going to be very, very small, but a large town or city water tower will be much larger. They are generally sized to accomodate a single full day of water use by the community they are serving (and some communities have multiple water towers). Typical size is going to be in the 500,000-1,000,000 gallon range. The pumps are going to be roughly 400-600 gpm, and have a head height in the 80-120ft range. So really, really stinking powerful. You are talking roughly 30kw/40hp to pump ~500gpm to 100ft of head height.

Now granted you don't need to fill the water tower at the maximum rate if your survivor group/community is much smaller than the original population served, but with a head height that big you'd still need a pretty powerful pump (you would not be able to use the ones for the tower, probably not even the jack pumps, because of power draw). Probably still a 2-4hp motor or 1.5-3kw electric powered pump just to refill the water tower even at lower volumes (not many water pumps have head heights of 100+ft).

Back to capacity though, at call it 20 gallons of water per day, per survivor an average sized water tower has enough water (if full) for 1 person for 69+ years or 100 people for maybe 1 year. You could use less water in a day, plenty of people get away with only using a couple of gallons of water per day for drinking and cooking and you could setup a grey water system for bathing and irigation. In that case you could stretch that water out to several years for a group of a couple of hundred people if used solely for drinking and cooking.

You are also going to have to hope that no one left their tap open when the zombies showed up and it stayed open when the power failed. Water towers are designed in part to provide water pressure when the power is out. If someone left a regular faucet tap open in the community when the zombies showed up, they'd be dumping 1-2gpm down the drain. A shower or bath 2-4gpm. call it maybe 2,000 gallons of water per day just for a sink faucet is going to get drained from that water tower. 3 or 4 taps left on in the community when the zombies came knocking and that water tower is going to be completely drained in just a few weeks.

At any rate, my only real point is just so that you think of how you might be using one plot wise.

It is a great idea for a small survivor group, or a group that needs to fill up on fresh clean water (maybe they've scored a landscaping truck with a big water tank, or even a tanker truck used for carrying potable liquids or something). A very small survivor group probably wouldn't have the resources to utilize a water tower in any real capacity (it isn't like there is a nice faucet sitting on one) and a really big group is going to use up the water in one, assuming it was full, is also going to burn through the water pretty fast (weeks/months maybe a year or two) without strict rationing and/or some way to effectively refill it.

[Thinyser]

One issue with them is it requires the water pumps to still be active. Those suckers use a lot of juice, so a little generator is not going to be able to power one. Of course they'd retain a lot of water, but the smaller ones are going to provide much water for a larger survivor group.

Water tower volumes vary. A building water tower is going to be very, very small, but a large town or city water tower will be much larger. They are generally sized to accomodate a single full day of water use by the community they are serving (and some communities have multiple water towers). Typical size is going to be in the 500,000-1,000,000 gallon range. The pumps are going to be roughly 400-600 gpm, and have a head height in the 80-120ft range. So really, really stinking powerful. You are talking roughly 30kw/40hp to pump ~500gpm to 100ft of head height.

Now granted you don't need to fill the water tower at the maximum rate if your survivor group/community is much smaller than the original population served, but with a head height that big you'd still need a pretty powerful pump (you would not be able to use the ones for the tower, probably not even the jack pumps, because of power draw). Probably still a 2-4hp motor or 1.5-3kw electric powered pump just to refill the water tower even at lower volumes (not many water pumps have head heights of 100+ft).

Back to capacity though, at call it 20 gallons of water per day, per survivor an average sized water tower has enough water (if full) for 1 person for 69+ years or 100 people for maybe 1 year. You could use less water in a day, plenty of people get away with only using a couple of gallons of water per day for drinking and cooking and you could setup a grey water system for bathing and irigation. In that case you could stretch that water out to several years for a group of a couple of hundred people if used solely for drinking and cooking.

You are also going to have to hope that no one left their tap open when the zombies showed up and it stayed open when the power failed. Water towers are designed in part to provide water pressure when the power is out. If someone left a regular faucet tap open in the community when the zombies showed up, they'd be dumping 1-2gpm down the drain. A shower or bath 2-4gpm. call it maybe 2,000 gallons of water per day just for a sink faucet is going to get drained from that water tower. 3 or 4 taps left on in the community when the zombies came knocking and that water tower is going to be completely drained in just a few weeks.

At any rate, my only real point is just so that you think of how you might be using one plot wise.

It is a great idea for a small survivor group, or a group that needs to fill up on fresh clean water (maybe they've scored a landscaping truck with a big water tank, or even a tanker truck used for carrying potable liquids or something). A very small survivor group probably wouldn't have the resources to utilize a water tower in any real capacity (it isn't like there is a nice faucet sitting on one) and a really big group is going to use up the water in one, assuming it was full, is also going to burn through the water pretty fast (weeks/months maybe a year or two) without strict rationing and/or some way to effectively refill it.

I believe they are talking about simply scavenging the water that is already in the tower's tank which is at first glance a great idea except that the water is in the tower its all gravity feed from there so any open and running faucets are going to eventually bleed it dry... and I bet there were plenty of people who left sinks, showers, sprinklers, etc. running when they ran for their lives. These ought to drain the tower in a matter of days once the pumps stop replenishing the tower's supply.