Your cart is empty.
A Berkey Water Purifier For Survival
When out in the wilderness, far from civilization, potable water becomes critical for survival. However in many regions, seemingly clean water can be contaminated by bacteria such as giardia, e. coli, and cryptosporidium. Having a berkey water purifier on hand to purify your water prior to drinking is essential under these conditions.
A friend was recently telling me of adventures he had snowmobiling in remote areas of Alaska many years ago. I asked him, “What did you do to provide fresh water if you ran out?” He replied, “That depended on where we were.”
He went on to describe several places they could count of providing drinking or cooking water for them in the wilderness. “At forty below zero, it was too cold to melt snow. It took too much snow and too much of our precious fire to melt enough to be practical. We would walk out onto the lake and add an extension on our auger to drill through the ice since it could be six feet thick. Once we struck water, we would get what we needed. Then we would clear around the hole, place a two inch thick piece of dense insulating Styrofoam over it, and cover it with snow to slow its freezing over.”
Though few people had ever been to these remote lakes, this did not guarantee the water was pure. Although people weren’t there, plenty of animals were, and they didn’t mind using the lake all summer as their latrine. One danger was something they called “beaver fever”, more officially known as giardiasis. Giardiasis is a diarrheal infection of the small intestine by a single-celled organism called Giardia lamblia. Approximately 200 million people are affected annually worldwide, mainly in areas where standing water can be contaminated.
To rid the questionable water of the danger of giardia, these Alaskan adventurers would do one of three things. First, they could boil the water for twenty minutes. This killed most pathogens that were living. It also left the water tasteless. Second, they could treat all water with halogenated tablets or solutions (water purification tablets). Both of these methods were fast but neither removed anything from the water. They just killed what was living and dangerous.
The third method was a survival water filter. This did not mean to run the water through a coffee filter but rather to run it through something designed to purifier the water and make it potable. The properties of the black berkey water purifiers found in all the Berkey systems, or the black filters found in the portable sport berkey are ideal in these situations.
Water filters not only remove the pathogens such as e. coli that is transmitted through fecal matter, but it also removes other substances that may be in the water and unknown to the drinker. This could be heavy metals or radioactive substances such as radon 222. The black berkey filters have the amazing ability to remove these contaminants without removing the beneficial minerals which provides the taste.
If you are an adventurer, be sure to take some type of gravity operated survival water filter such as a Berkey water purifier. Your life and health may depend on it!
