Water Filters Blog

Naturally, in the event of a hurricane or a tropical storm, everyone’s first priority is to avoid the storm and get through it safely. We’ve been following the news stories about the storm in Texas, Erin, and in the Caribbean, Hurricane Dean. These severe weather events are scary and upsetting and dangerous, but people who live in hurricane belts know how to prepare for bad weather. In many communities, evacuations are standard operating procedure, and people know how to arrange for their personal safety. But in the aftermath of a major storm, as some have learned first-hand, one of the biggest problems in returning home after an evacuation is the inability to come home to a safe water supply.

Flooding can result in the local water supply being contaminated. Historically speaking, it’s well known that a contaminated water supply is a public threat. In America, where we’ve become accustomed to regarding our water as being generally safe, it’s easy for us to forget that we really need to be careful.

Scientists know that hurricanes and tropical storms that cause flooding have a real impact on the health and well-being of the people who live in the affected area. Water test results from hurricane-struck regions indicate that post-storm water quality often drops dramatically. TSS (Total Suspended Solids) rates climb, often to alarming rates. Undesirable elements can be found, suddenly, in the water supply – phosphorus, nitrates, and fecal coliform, to name a few. (Fecal coliform is a bacterial family, and most of us are familiar with its most notorious member, e. Coli.) Turbidity levels climb after a hurricane and its associated flooding. Sewers overflow. To be blunt about it, your water is a mess after a storm event.

Truly awful problems can arise, in the worst case scenarios, after flooding or weather disasters. Even recently there are accounts of cholera outbreaks that are attributed to the fouling of water after storms.  Obviously this is not common in the United States but it is not impossible. Other bacterial infections are more likely, none of them desirable. The CDC offers guidelines to the public on what to do in the event of the water supply suffering a hygienic impairment, and the advice is sound. Filtering water is the first step we can take to assure ourselves that water is safe to drink. (The CDC website, www.cdc.gov, is a useful source of information on many health-related issues, and we urge readers to bookmark it.)

We’ve all been trained to stockpile bottled water in the event of a hurricane, but after the hurricane has passed, it’s much more sensible to make sure that your household’s water is run through a filtering system. Questions of storage and affordability are likely to make bottled water a poor choice for those living in areas where hurricanes are a common occurrence. A water filtering system is infinitely preferable.

At the very least your drinking and cooking water should be filtered, but ideally, all the water in your house should be filtered. When acts of God have struck your home, the cleanup process is long and difficult. But it is smart to plan for your good health and happy future, even in the face of a disaster, by having clean water.

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