The other day, my sister-in-law, Kristie, called me and asked if the stored water they kept in their 55-gallon water barrel was still good. It took me a moment to catch up with her and the conversation she’d already been having in her head about the topic, but apparently I’d given them a water barrel a decade ago (before we moved to Washington state) … water that they hadn’t changed since then. I silently cringed a bit, and my hesitation was apparent.
While I recognize that not everyone is going to take their preparedness as seriously as I do, not even family, I felt like ten years was too long, and I let her know as much. I told her she should change it.
Kristie pressed me on my answer. She said that her brother tasted the water, and it tasted fine. She said the water looked clear and smelled fine, too. They even put bleach in it (I assume I told them to do that years ago) so there shouldn’t have been a problem.
The truth is, she was right.
I didn’t have a good answer why she needed to change the water. The fact is that, as I state in day four of my blueprint survival course, “Water doesn’t magically go bad. Ever. In fact, it can’t! Instead, it’s the contaminants that water carries with it, which makes water go bad or otherwise be dangerous to your health. The only other way initially clean water goes bad is if it gets contaminated after having been stored somehow.”
More specifically, water only goes bad if it’s been contaminated at any point. Period. Therefore, we add bleach (or some other chemical treatment) to help ensure that doesn’t happen.
Really, the only reason I had for her to change the water was because of my feelings, my paranoia, if you will. I simply felt like ten years was too long, and that wasn’t logical. But you never know, and I prefer not to take any chances with something as crucial as water storage. After all, it only takes one contaminated drop to make you or others have a terrible day.
So, did she end up changing the water?
Yes.
See … sometimes paranoia wins after all. 🙂
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