Last week, we talked about ideal hydration for planned trails and hikes, with tips on the best ways to carry precious water in a controlled situation. But now let’s do a little exercise and take the challenge up a notch: how can we guarantee optimal hydration if we are caught by surprise, by accident, without our valuable equipment?
The rule of basic survival states that the first steps someone should take in an emergency situation should be to provide water, fire, shelter and food — not necessarily, but probably in that order. Human beings, as a rule, can go up to three days without drinking water, before falling into the dangerous realm of dehydration. In special environments and circumstances, and depending on the person’s health, this time may be even shorter. We then asked experts what can be done without equipment to ensure maximum safety when drinking water found in the bush.
For those caught off guard in a hostile environment, the method that has the most consensus among experts when trying to escape an inconvenient piriri is also the best known: boiling the water found.
“Boiling water for a few minutes is sterilizing, it kills any living form, preventing the transmission of diseases”, explains psychiatrist specialist in medicine in remote areas and experienced hiker Rodrigo Rodriguez. “The method alone does not prevent chemical contamination, but in 99.9% of scenarios, this is irrelevant”, he adds.
Survival instructor and field trainer Emerson Magalhães Jorge agrees with him, who highlights “that boiling greatly changes the flavor of the water, which should only be boiled once and consumed in its entirety, we should not boil the same water more than once time”.
But if we start from the possibility that the person in trouble does not have a vessel that allows water to boil, but by happy chance has a colorless bottle on hand, Rodriguez states that the purification system using solar ultraviolet light can be tried. . “Just leave the water in that bottle for a few hours under the strong sun,” he explains. “It’s not highly effective, but it’s the best possible for this scenario,” he adds.
But what if the citizen doesn’t have any container on hand, what should he do?
An alternative method that retired colonel and Via Radical Brasil survival instructor Marcelo Montibeller teaches his students is to dig a well near a watercourse. “We dug one meter deep at a distance of one meter from the lake and, through capillarity, the water that comes out of there will be filtered”, he explains, noting that, even so, some type of boil must be sought. “Can you drink it? Yes. If it will sustain you for a minute longer in a survival situation, drink it, but the results cannot be controlled”, he ponders.
He also points out that “there is no point in purifying water for drinking and cooking and brushing your teeth with untreated water, which generates cross-contamination.”
For those who are more skilled and patient, we can also recommend assembling an improvised filter, like the ones we learned to make in science classes at school, remember?
To do this, in a pet bottle, clean cloth or plastic bags, you can add a layer of ground charcoal (which the reader can take from the fire they lit to roast that tasty grasshopper, for example, since we are talking about survival), one of sand and, finally, a handful of pebbles, the smallest ones you can find. As charcoal is a natural filter, which works as an absorbent of impurities (or, at least, that’s what my teacher said), the water filtered from larger dirt by stones and then by sand would, in theory, be purified enough to be drunk, with some risk, of course, but in a way that will save your life until help arrives.
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