In a survival situation, after treating the injured, the search of water is the most urgent situation.

If you are lacking water, our life expectancy is figuring around two days at a desert and a little over a week in cooler climates.

The amounts of water you need depend on the temperature and environment humidity and of the physical activity we are performing, but it will never be less than 2 liters per day. In a desert you will need 10 or 12 liters to perform normal activity.

Finding water

In mild areas it is usually easy to find water. In dry and desert areas it can be more complicated. Digging in dry riverbanks or streams can bring good results sometimes. Vegetation in a determined place indicates water existence. You can search inside caves in chalky terrains. Animals need to drink too; observing their movement during the first hours of the morning or late during the evening can give us a clue as to water whereabouts. Determined plants, which vary depending on the geographical area, only grow where water is present.

In case we don’t find a source of water, we can still make the most of condensation produced even in deserts by improvising a distiller.

You will need a 2 x 2 m plastic and a bucket or other container to collect the water. A plastic tube to drink without dismounting the distiller is also very useful. You can get 0.5 to 1 liter of water per day with this system.

We need to dig a hole where we will place a container at the bottom that will receive condensation water produced at the walls of the plastic with which we will cover this hole. A rock at the center of the plastic will lead the drops to the bucket. The distiller will be more effective if we put plants inside the hole to take advantage of their humidity.

Dangers

In many areas of the globe, especially in the third world, a risk of intoxication by water consumption is a possibility, be it by bacterial contamination or ingestion of parasites contained in it.

There is a certain risk when consuming water from streams flowing among fields fertilized with highly contaminated manures in the first world.

Consuming contaminated waters can cause diseases such as typhus fever, cholera or dysentery, in addition to other disorders caused by parasites we could catch not only by drinking, but also by bathing in stagnant and contaminated waters.

We must never drink saltwater, its salt concentration is so high it collapses the kidneys and causes death among strong pain. Urine should not be drank either and we should not forget that milky plants are often poisonous.

Purifying water

Water must be purified if there is a risk of contamination with any of these methods and wait for at least an hour before consuming it.

Water purification tablets: It is the most practical and 100% effective method. It consists of adding purifying tablets to the water. These release silver ions that terminate the germs, prevent new infections and produce no damage, even if the dose is exceeded. The boxes contain a variable number of tablets depending on each tablet’s capacity (from 1.5 to 20 liters of water)
You can easily find them at camping stores, and also on the internet.

Iodine: To disinfect the water with iodine tincture we will use around 10 drops per liter. Coloration takes a while to disappear.

Chlorine: Chlorine leaves an unpleasant taste in the water.  We will use 4 to 6 drops per liter.

Boiling: Boiling the water does not eliminate all the germs (e.g. hepatitis resists boiling), but it removes most of them and with all the parasites. It must be boiled during 10 minutes. In this case, it can be consumed after cooling.

Filtering water

Sometimes, the only water we will be able to get will be stagnant and dirty water in puddles. Before drinking it, and without overlooking purification, we must clarify it to remove suspended particles.

The simplest way is to let it sit during several hours in a container, and then pour it to another container at a lower level with a plastic tube or a hollow and flexible stem of a plant.

It can also be filtered using several layers of fabric or with clean sand, with the aid of an improvised filter with a piece of bamboo cane, whose end we will cover with grass.

Survival hunting and fishing

We will mention hunting and fishing methods in this article. We must clarify that these systems are very cruel and inhuman and usually cause great suffering to the animals; on the other hand, their use is illegal in most countries. All of this makes it evident that their use would only be justified in a case of extreme need.

In a real survival situation, we should not forget that amphibians, reptiles and mostly insects are easier to hunt than birds and mammals and are an important protein source.