The Water Resilience Field Manual

The Water Resilience Field Manual is a practical, no-nonsense guide to building a household water system that still works when the tap does not.

Most emergency-water advice stops at “store one gallon per person per day.” This manual goes much further. It shows you how to calculate what your household actually needs, store it intelligently, avoid common contamination mistakes, understand treatment limits, reduce water use during an outage, plan for evacuation, protect pets and special-needs family members, and build redundancy so one failed container, filter, or assumption does not collapse the entire plan.

Inside, you’ll find practical guidance on:

• 72-hour, 7-day, and 14-day household water planning
• Storage containers, placement, rotation, and safe dispensing
• Boiling, disinfection, filtration, and what each method cannot do
• Boil-water advisories vs. chemical contamination warnings
• Sanitation when potable water is limited
• Apartment and small-space water planning
• Private wells, cisterns, and alternative water sources
• Evacuation water and the problem of weight
• Household failure drills and scenario planning
• A buyer’s guide for evaluating filters, storage products, and treatment claims
• Printable calculators, rotation logs, redundancy audits, decision cards, and a 30-day implementation plan
• Current CDC, EPA, USGS, FEMA, and other reference resources with clickable links

The manual also uses real historical examples, including the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, to show what happens when a community’s water system becomes a single point of failure.

The goal is simple: make the first step toward a more resilient household easy to say yes to.