A powerful thirst

New Year celebrations inspire powerful thirsts, to be addressed with bubbly liquids. But this time around my New Year’s thirst is taking a turn for the practical. I’m thinking about water.

Yes, water.

Water has always been a little problematic on Saipan. But I’ve been a lot of other places where water is dangerous, and my work has taken me to two tropical locales that were in the grips of cholera outbreaks. As for 2009, I may work in some very remote places this year, and phrases like “amoebic dysentery” are enough to make me wince.

I’ve never been entirely smug about Saipan’s water situation, since every typhoon that guns for the Commonwealth does entail a probability (how large, I know not) of causing a potable water crisis. I thought I had a workable solution to that: I stored 20 gallons of drinking water in a set of plastic, 5-gallon jerry cans that I bought at the Guam Kmart.

The idea backfired. The containers leaked after a few months.

As for rainwater, I’d prefer to clean it up before drinking it. And as for boiling water to clean it, that’s such a fuel-intensive endeavor that it’s not practical in a lot of cases.

It looks to me that we’re left with several methods for emergency, or field, or travel, water cleaning. I’ll highlight two and mention one other; and I’ll skip a few entirely for brevity.

First, we consider purification tablets. These are tiny pills that commonly contain iodine (which some people are allergic too); you drop them (the pills, not the allergic people) into a container of water to kill the germs (or so they say; you’ll have to ask a scientist how many, and what types, of germs they kill). Common offerings are bottles of 50 pills which, at two pills per quart, will treat 25 quarts. The cost is around ten bucks per bottle, less if you shop around, more if you don’t. That’s a must-have in typhoon territory. I mean, why not?

If you really want to get fancy, you arrive at a second method, which can certainly be combined with the first one. This is the portable water filter, and the market is (I can’t resist the pun) saturated with brands and models, which are commonly sold to hikers and backpackers. Although some filters inject iodine into the water to kill all the germs, most don’t, and you’re up against a situation where you wonder if the pores in the filter are small enough to trap the smallest of the germs, so you just have to research it.

I’ll just mention that the ditty-bag I have for my filter has a stash of iodine pills in it, so I can combat germs using both methods.

Anyway, portable filters are typically hand-powered pumps that push water through the filter media. They are certainly unobtrusive enough to keep in your typhoon kit or your hiking kit, and are anywhere in size from, very approximately, can-of-soda size up to half-liter-bottle-of-soda size. As for costs, they’re generally in the $50 to $100 range for ones with a lot of plastic parts (common brands are MSR, First Need, and Katadyn).

Then the price point leaps vertically for a metal model (with ceramic filter media) made in Switzerland; this is the Katadyn Pocket Filter, which won’t fit in your pocket, but will sure lighten it. They’ve climbed in price, now listed anywhere from $190 to $280, but they’re hard to find in stock now. Anyway, I think they’re cool.

Lately, there’s been a clever, and comparatively cheaper, way to filter afield, and these are bottles or canteens with integrated filters. They’re typically around $30 to $50. I’ve never tried one.

If you’ve spent much time in the developing tropics, you might have heard of a technique that is sometimes talked about (“SODIS,” which I take to mean solar disinfecting, but I don’t really know). This entails using a clear, two-liter plastic beverage bottle to bake water in the sun’s UV rays for six hours. Information is all over the Internet.

In fact, all this stuff is all over the Internet, so you can make your own decisions. I don’t claim that my approach is the best or is perfect, but I think it’s a lot better than nothing. Be it typhoons, long hikes, or adventuresome travel, a little study and preparation now can prevent some real misery later.