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The Prepper's Water Survival Guide is shown.
The Prepper's Water Survival Guide is shown.

The Prepper's Water Survival Guide: Harvest, Treat and Store Your Most Vital Resource by Daisy Luther (Ulysses Press paperback, 2015), 216 pages including index and appendix, $14.95

Has this newspaper section lost its mind? Preppers are antisocial Doomsday theorists who hide out in the hills, stockpiling dried beans and pouring their own bullets. This book is for conspiracy nuts. Why bother to notice it?

Tell that to the citizens of Charleston, W.Va., who weren't able to use municipal water for weeks in January 2014 after a mining-chemical distributor allowed 4-methyl-cyclohexane methanol to poison the Elk River.

Prepping might be a popular preoccupation among people inclined to irrationally "apocalyze" events, but it's also a fascination for optimists, like Boy Scout Jamboree planners.

Further, most of us are dependent on the water provided by our communities. Usually that's ideal, because municipal water systems must meet standards, and they have professional managers looking out for us. But tornadoes and chemical spills do happen. Construction accidents do happen.

Makes sense to think about where your next drink might come from.

Harrumph. Does this book offer anything we couldn't find on the Internet?

Yes. In addition to 144 pages of guidance on acquiring, filtering and storing water, it offers 72 expendable pages you can use for tinder when it's time to make fire.

That was a joke, right?

Yes, but author Daisy Luther spends most of her first five chapters explaining why readers should want to save water when, hey, we just bought a book about saving water. We want to save the water.

What useful information does she provide?

Some that involves common sense (don't run the tap when you brush your teeth) and some that involves math, including equations for how much water would

be needed per person per day, how much water might be collected by using your roof as a catchment area, how much chlorine or iodine is needed to disinfect a suspect supply.

She gives detailed instructions for digging a well and for:

• Breaking into a water heater; draining pipes; ladling out the toilet flush tank (if it's not full of Ty-D-Bol);

• Building rain barrels, an outhouse, a solar still;

• Cleaning your body, cleaning the kitchen, washing clothes by hand, dealing with human waste.

• Testing for contaminants, disinfecting a well.

Why you don't want white socks; why a swimming pool's not the answer; why you never pour bleach down the hole of your outhouse; why distillation can't be trusted to remove herbicides and pesticides and can in fact concentrate them in your drinking water.

She recommends specific products by brand, like WaterBob bags for collecting water in the tub (she assumes you don't want to hide there when the tornado comes), RainSaucers for collecting rain, WonderWash hand-operated clothes washers ....

Her lists for everyday conservation are the sort one finds easily on the Internet. But in her defense, it's not nearly such obvious book-padding as is her concluding chapter with its five pages that recap the contents of all the preceding chapters.

Who is the author?

Luther lives somewhere in the foothills of northern California, where she blogs at theorganicprepper.ca. She is the author of The Pantry Primer: How to Build a One Year Food Supply in Three Months and The Organic Canner. She co-wrote The Prepper's Blueprint and contributed to Ebola Survival Handbook: A Collection of Tips, Strategies, and Supply Lists From Some of the World's Best Preparedness Professionals.

This author was seriously worried about Ebola?

The woman likes to be prepared.

ActiveStyle on 07/20/2015

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