Winter Power Outage Scenario

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Surviving Without Running Water

We live in the city, so we would not normally expect to be without running water during a short-term power outage.  However, if you have well water, you won't be able to run the well pump during a power outage!  Your water will run out as soon as you empty your pressure tank.  And even in the city, if there is an extended city-wide power outage, the water will quit flowing at some point as the city needs electricity to pump water into the water towers.

Sanitation Plan Faults

We definitely had some holes in our alternative sanitation plan.  We had thought through it prior to my snap decision to shut off the water, but there is nothing like actually trying to do it.

In short, we realized we needed a separate area for liquids and solid waste collection as you should dispose of them differently.  Bagging liquids like we had planned for our solids is a dangerous proposition if the bag springs a leak.  Next time we will have a designated bucket for liquids in addition to lining the (empty) toilet with bags for solids. 

What did work well was using a combination of baby wipes and Purell for hand cleaning purposes.  We plan to add a few more baby wipes to the kit as they were so useful!

Drinking Water Success

Our drinking water preparations, however, preformed beautifully.  We followed the guidelines I wrote about on my water storage page and had at least 7 gallons of water stored per person. 

We use the blue Reliance 7-gallon Aqua-Tainer for our primary water storage.  I was reminded of why I like them so much.  They are just small enough so you can handle them (albeit with some effort), but large enough that you aren't dealing with a ton of small containers – a very efficient system for our needs.

I think the best feature of the Aqua-Tainer is the spigot that allows for controlled water dispensing.  This minimized waste due to sloshing and over filling that is typical when pouring from a large container.  We placed the jug on the counter and hung the spout over the edge to get the water we needed.  When not in use, we tip the whole unit upright as it can drip a bit if the cap is not on tight.

Find out next what we learned about survival cooking…

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