Hurricane season is upon us, and if you live along the East coast you have been hearing about hurricane preparedness. It is recommended that a family have up to a two-week supply of non-perishable food and drinking water on hand to ride out a bad hurricane situation. This means something like a gallon of clean water per person per day. Since I have a family of six plus a dog, a two week supply is heading toward 100 gallons of water for me. If I bought that in the form of bottled water, I would need to have 800 half-liter bottles of water on hand for my family. Or imagine 100 milk jugs of water sitting in the garage. It’s a lot of water.

The problem is that many people don’t prepare and then the hurricane strikes. In Raleigh, when a big hurricane struck several years back, it uprooted thousands and thousands of trees, cutting off all the electricity in the city, closing every store and gas station and making travel nearly impossible until the trees could be cleared.

So let’s imagine that you are stuck in your house, the emergency radio is telling you the water is bad or completely cut off, and you forgot to stick a hundred jugs of water in the garage to ride it out. What are you going to do to find clean drinking water?