 I appreciate everybody coming out today. We are hosted today by two organizations inside the North Keepers of Greater St. Louis and also the Missouri Militia St. Louis unit. So I'd like to introduce Frank Butler, who is Frank. He's President of the North Keepers Chapter here in St. Louis. How you doing? How you doing? And Jim Uchoff is the commanding officer of the Militia unit for St. Louis. So thank you both for your support in doing this. We only have two hours. This is stuff we spend a lot of time on throughout the year. We're full of organizations, so we kind of condensed it down just to some short presentations just to give you a quick overview of everything. We're going to start off with water storage, then we'll go over hygiene and sanitation, food storage, medical supplies, communications, and then just a little more information on what you can do as an individual. Probably about halfway through, we'll take a little short break. So if anybody needs to go pot or get coffee, just kind of hold off until then so we can try and get everything done in two hours a week. It's a lot of material to try and cover. So with that said, Pierre's going to be our first presenter on water storage. What I'm covering today with water is some pretty basic stuff. And I usually like to start with kind of the why, why are we talking about water? And there's obviously some points of water that are obvious, like hydration, we need water to live. But I think there's a lot of other reasons why we might want to have water in an emergency situation that is often overlooked. So this kind of list here is going kind of from the obvious to down maybe not so obvious things. So hydration, again, like I said, is the obvious point. We also need for cooking, sanitation, we have pets, animals, they also require water. But we also need them potentially for things like laundry, gardens, maybe even trade if it's a long type of term emergency situation. So these are the very high level kind of reasons why we're looking at water preparation. Now we know why, how much do we need? Leading into this is, again, kind of based on, well, what are we actually trying to do? From a very simple survival point of view, we need about a gallon of water per person. This varies greatly depending on how active we are, hot the weather is, but this is kind of the number that's come up with, this is actually sourced from the World Health Organization, from studies they've done globally, and in places like Africa and so forth. But they figure it's roughly around 2.5 to three liters per day, which is approximately one gallon, six or a little bit less than that. Basic hygiene, another gallon and a half. And basic cooking is another gallon and a half. One thing I guess I would note though about cooking is when we do get to the food preparation portion, a lot of people are stocking up on dehydrated foods and things like that. Whenever we're doing that, we're gonna need more water than you typically would use for cooking because we have to rehydrate that. So if you're putting together some sort of water storage plan, just keep that in mind when you're figuring out how much water. But the end total here, there's roughly four gallons per adult and their family. And a child is slightly less but not much, so really it's four gallons per person. That's fairly the substantial amount of water if you're trying to store it up all at once. This chart here is kind of a hierarchy of water requirements. And generally the main thing we want to get off of this is the quality of water kind of depends on what you're using it for. Drinking, cooking, water, but do we really need a stockpile of hundreds of gallons of pure water to do something like wash clothes or even water animals or clean up and sanitize in some cases? So as we kind of go down this chart, the quality of the water is also going down. The volume is going up, but the quality is also going down. So this is actually looking at what are the minimum requirements for a family of four per day. So we have 10 liters of water here. And again, that's for drinking purposes. And then that translates roughly up to a gallon per person, so around four gallons, so more than average. What will we need to actually store water? We break it into a few categories here, short-term, mid-term, long-term. The short-term is the easiest, I mean, you could just have a few cases of bottled water being around that you broke in every so often. But we essentially have a stock supply of water for short-term, that is what would be recommended. Some sort of containers for the water storage itself could be 55 gallons or on as it could be, like I said, water bottles. The containers also need to be used though for usage of the water. This is actually something that I found out with myself and my family when we were kind of testing out our preparedness plan, is we had all the water, but we didn't necessarily have a good, easy way of getting it out of a big drum of water down to a little container so we could actually use it on a daily basis. So that kind of thinking it through from start to end is pretty important looking at these things. And that's, the other thing that you'd want though is that ability to kind of purify small amounts of water. And we'll talk about purifying a little more here in the next slide. But for short-term, we're really looking at days or weeks. Mid-term is when we start those weeks start to potentially turn into months. When you're talking about months of water, it's no longer necessarily practical to store this for most people. You don't necessarily have a cistern or a reservoir that holds 6,000 gallons of water to keep your family sustained for months. So when you're talking about mid-term planning, you really need to kind of augment that with the ability to get water somewhere. Could be a stream, river, lake, pond, whatever. But you need some way to be able to go out and forge for water. But that brings in kind of a new problem. We need to be able to transport water. And so you need to also have containers just for moving the water back and forth. Something you'd easily carry, something that isn't going to be too burdensome. And this is a constant need that you're going to have is having to get water. So if it's something that's difficult to do, it's not something that is going to be very good for your long-term survival. This is also, though, where we start shifting from the storage of water and more into the purifying of water. We don't want to get sick from drinking out of a contaminated stream or something along those lines. So we do need the ability to purify large quantities of water. The last one is just talk about briefly as long-term storage. So what happens if you actually had something like an economic collapse and city water stops? And it's not coming back, at least not coming back any time soon. This is where you really need the ability to have kind of a permanent water source. This might be a well, but if you don't have running water, it may very well not have running electricity as well. So if you have a well, you need a way of either manually pumping that water, or maybe a solar panel or something as a backup to help you pump the water. But this is where you really start to need to kind of think about how am I getting my water today, and how can I turn that into a long-term plan if I no longer have the great type of infrastructure to help me with this. And there are a lot of options here. There's a lot of places in this world where you don't even have to go to third world countries. There's sort of very rural places in our own country with places like Alaska. They don't have necessarily permanent water sources. A lot of times, they have to literally ship in water to fill up a system, or they have to use permanent water sources like streams and so forth to actually get their water. So I think what I would strongly suggest is if you are interested in more of a long-term strategy is research what people are doing in these areas of how do they survive today. Because the situation that they're in today is not really much different from a situation where we want to be planning for a long-term. So if we're storing water, what kind of shelf life does it have? The thing that we really want to understand here is most of the shelf life considerations for water have to do with the storage containers themselves. It's something like a water bottle has an expiration on it because of the plastic. And the water bottle eventually starts to break down and it starts luching chemicals into the water. It's not necessarily that the water inside of it is going bad, although there are potential issues for that too. You have things like mildew and algae and various other things that can start growing in that water. So the first thing that we want to consider is what kind of containers are we using in the water? It really is a vital choice here if you want it to be viable for a long-term. The container should be food safe. If it's transparent, it really does need to be stored somewhere dark and cool. Main purpose again here is to prevent growth of any mold, mildew, algae, that type of thing. If the water is bulky, you really do need to start taking into account the flip-prints that it has. And I'll talk about this a little bit in the next slide to what anybody flip-prints, but it really is how much space it's taking in. And as I kind of mentioned earlier, don't overlook the ease of access and the ability to restock this water. Just because you have a 35-dellum drum of water doesn't mean it's gonna be easier to water out, doesn't mean it's gonna be easy to water into it, that sort of thing. You have to look at how do you actually live with this if you have to use it. If this becomes your new source of water and your only source, you need to be able to actually utilize it effectively in all ways that, in general though, you should be rotating any water that comes from kind of a commercial container about every six to nine months. That'd be a case of, or something along those lines. It could be just really simple that you were rotating in your daily use. Maybe you drink this water as you're going by and you're just always restocked in the backgrounds you have enough in there. Or it could also be that you really do have large volumes of it, like in a barrel or some sort of system, and you just ampute and refill it every few months. In general though, it will last a while, if I should say. Is this true also for distilled water? It is true also for distilled water, just because distilled water is still gonna come in, we'll say, in a plastic jug or something along those lines. And so we each enough chemicals and some of those things are still in issue with the containers. So here's some numbers. I think I recommend as a two week storage of pure water for short term emergencies. That's right around 225 gallons of water for a family of four. That is 1700 half liter bottles. This bottle of water that I have sitting right back here, it's roughly 1700 of these. That's a lot of bottles of water distilled in the case like you're a closet. It also, they're very bulky. There's a lot of waste that stays here. If you look at something instead, like down in the corner, you have a food grade IVC tote. It holds 275 gallons of water. It is a roughly 24% less space to store that water than it would be a pallet of water bottles. Just because of the extra bulk of packaging and air in there and all of that sort of thing. And it's even 20% less than a 55 gallon barrel. So this is where footprint matters when you're stockpiling large amounts of water. Because that takes up precious space that you might be able to use for other things like food or other supplies that you need as an emergency situation. So the idea here though is just think about how we work together. So water purification. This is a topic in its own right. You could literally spend an hour just talking about different ways of purifying water. What we want to get here though is that there are several methods. And it ranges anywhere from filtration to letting it settle out, disinfecting agents such as bleach, iodine, or dioxide. All sorts of different options here. These are things that you really are gonna have to kind of investigate for yourself and see what makes sense. Some of them are easier than others. Some of them are cheaper than others. Using something like bleach to purify a large volume of water is pretty cheap and pretty easy. But it isn't necessarily always the best option because you also have to store bleach. Bleach also has a shelf life. And obviously you have to work through some of those problems as well. Gravity-fed water systems are pretty popular. I know the Berkey is popular with a lot of Preppers and it's a pretty large filtration system. But it's very similar for the water in the top. Clean water comes out the bottom. The filter lasts about six months. And it's an easy way of going. It's pretty expensive. Several hundred dollars to be into and the filters themselves, the replacement filters are communities of dollars. So this is again, something you'd have to kind of weigh for yourself. But easily the cheapest route is chemical disinfectants. However, like I said, there's downsides to those as well. So just some purification numbers here really quick. Hard to see a little bit. But this kind of gives you the example between bleach, iodine, betadine, some of the things that we use here to do it. There's some differences between one of the waters clear, whether it's cloudy, and what the temperature of water is also matters for how long the water's sick in order to be considered to be purified. Do you need some time for it to actually do what's working between the microbes that might be living in the water? But again, it's relatively easy. So for five gallons of water, it's a half table smooth amount of bleach. Do keep in mind though that you are going to taste that. So it's an emergency situation, so it's not necessarily the end of the world, but if you have to live up to the day after day, you might get sick after a while. So what are the recommendations? At the bare minimum, the recommendation is to have two weeks of pure water on hand for short-term frequencies. Like I said, this could be several cases of water bottles. It could be a few other things. One of the products of this out there is something called a waterbomb. It's a bladder for your bathtub. It allows you to fill it up right as an emergency's happening before the water's off or before your water is depleted. And it stays completely sealed and sits in your bathtub. It's just a little pump for you to pump the water on. Maybe around 100 gallons of water you can get in one of those. So that could be something to help augment. That could easily give your family some extra water and type of limit. Second recommendation is have some means of being able to purify water. Like your's worth of water is what we would recommend for kind of that mid-term preparation. So you have your immediate to pure water for the short-term. Your plan for your mid-term is a fine place where you can get renewable water streams on the normal times with the purification. And that's where you would go into three. You really need to kind of predetermine where these locations are. Distance matters. You're gonna be carrying this water. Water is heavy. World Health Organization recommends to know more than about a third of a mile away if you're gonna have to do this daily. Anything more than that, it starts becoming a strain. And you're actually burning more calories and burning sweat and water evaporation stuff and it's really even worse. So that's not very far, a third of a mile. But that is the recommendation. And again, if long-term is desired, really research off-grid type systems. The last slide here for water, just some other considerations. Water does not need to be the same moment. You wanna stress this. Don't think you necessarily have to have thousands of gallons of pure water on hand to be able to do all the things that you need water for. It may be a situation where you have pure water for drinking and you wash your clothes in the stream or something along those lines. That could be good enough. Water also doesn't need to have a single source. It shouldn't actually even have a single source. You should look around for alternative sources. What happens if the ponds that you're playing on using dries up or becomes contaminated somehow. The animal dies next to it or something along the line towards no longer fit to drink. You also don't need to store all of this water ahead of time. If you, with an apartment as an example, you might not have room to have a large storage of water or even cases of water bottles. So what do you do? That's where you can consider using one of those bath with water bladders or something along those lines. They're not as safe of an option of having the water on hand but it's better than not having any option for water. And really the last thing just to consider is planning and testing of your plan. Really walk through the scenario from start to finish. As I kind of led with at the beginning, testing your plan will lead to things that you didn't anticipate. So my family had water. We go through kind of testing the plan and realize we didn't have a good way of getting to the water and actually utilizing the water. You find that out when you start really kind of thinking those things and then combining them with your other plans like your sanitation plan, your food plan and those type of things. Did I really plan for enough water to rehydrate all the food that I stored? And I'm planning for enough water to be able to stay clean so I'm not getting sick and those type of things. And I use how much I use the water for all of those other things. Just start thinking it from A to Z, front to back. That's really water and I'm not sure I can have questions. All the way to the back. What do you buy and purchase a water planter? My one on Amazon. They're about $23 somewhere in that range. Just a plastic bladder that unfolds. You put it in the bathtub. It has a little fixture that goes over the end of the bathtub and like I said, it has a little hand pump to get the water out. There's a few different brands out there. There's some that are made in America and stuff too if that's important to you. What about hot water heaters? You usually say you can do 80 gallons. Yeah, and that's kind of what the purpose of those water planters are for the bathtub is it drains out that water heater and now it has it in an easily accessible way. It's not that heating it out of the little tap at the bottom of the water heater isn't accessible but it's not necessarily as easy as just going up and pumping out some water into a jug that you can use for the day. But it's the same idea. You drain it out of your water heater when the emergency happens. You now have it available to you. I saw in the internet that you could borrow this bottle and know if you got water out of the stream that it would purify it. Can you see that? There's a lot of different filtration type systems and everything from the life straws where you suck the water out of the stream and it filters as it goes. There's hand pump filtration where you can actually really like the burp and it's a gravity fed. That's kind of how a lot of the bottles work is you pour it into the top, it goes through or you either drain through the filter. It's one of those two things. They're just a filtered based system. The filter based systems are all highly dependent on the quality of your filter. As to what you're drinking, just as an example, if you live in a cell that you have a lot of the streams that are very heavy in the lead content and so forth. Well, a lot of just basic off the shelf water filters don't filter that out. So that might be something that you want to take an extra consideration. Or if you're worried about city water supplies and you want to filter things out of the way before and so forth, there's special filters for that sort of thing. Thank you for your idea.