How to Prepare for a Drinking

Aug 02, 2023

How to make sure you have safe drinking water if your supply is compromised or interrupted

You can live far longer without food than without water. So stocking enough potable water—and refreshing it periodically—should be top of mind when you’re preparing for situations in which your tap water supply becomes tainted or a natural disaster threatens it on its way to you. Follow these tips from emergency management experts and CR’s own safety expert.

If faced with a water emergency, you’ll need at least 1 gallon per person per day, for at least three days, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even better is to store enough to get you through two weeks. Here are ways to make sure you have enough water to drink during an emergency:

If you have a bathtub and don’t expect to evacuate, buy a capped plastic bladder that can hold drinkable water there. Fill the bladder with tap water you can use for drinking. If you don’t have such a bladder you can still fill the tub, but use the water only for flushing the toilet and washing.

Buy sealed, prefilled jugs, or sanitize and fill food-grade jugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration with tap water. Keep containers cool (50° F to 70° F), out of sunlight, and away from toxic substances, such as pesticides and gasoline, that can permeate the plastic. Replace the water every six months. (Use the old water for nondrinking purposes, such as washing your car.) To conserve space, look for stackable containers. We found stackable 3.5-gallon jugs made of food-grade materials from an online emergency supplier. A two-pack sells for $37; a 10-pack costs less per jug.

For more information on safe water, see CR’s Water Safety & Quality Guide.

If space is limited, get creative. “Put [water containers] under your bed, or put a plank and cloth on a few of them and create an ottoman,” suggests Brenda Muhammad, executive director of Focusing Our Resources for Community Enlightenment (FORCE), a not-for-profit in Syracuse, N.Y., that teaches emergency skills.

Do the best you can in terms of carrying water in your emergency “go bag.” One gallon of water weighs 8.34 pounds, so there’s only so much each person can carry. One way to reduce the weight you carry is to replace plastic bottles with lighter-weight water sacs. They start at about $13 for a three-day supply for one person. They last up to five years, says David Ofwono, director of First on Compliance, a training and consulting company in California focused on emergency management and response.

A boil-water advisory from health officials means you can drink tap water that has been boiled for at least 1 minute (or 3 minutes at elevations above 6,500 feet). With a do-not-drink advisory, even boiling might not make tap water safe, so use only stored, potable water for drinking, cooking, and brushing your teeth. A do-not-use advisory warns not to use tap water for any purpose.

Learn more about water advisories and other safe-water advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Red Cross also offers expert advice on dealing with water and food safety and emergencies.

Recently, as public attention has focused on common contaminants in drinking water, CR’s has warned consumers to avoid bottled water with undesirable levels of contaminants. During a water emergency, however, those precautions should take a back seat to getting proper hydration, says James Rogers, CR’s acting head of product safety testing who also works on drinking-water safety issues. “While normally we would advise consumers to be very selective in choosing their bottled water, in times of emergency when they may have no other choice, we recommend that they drink any potable water source until the emergency has passed,” Rogers says.

Water contamination from, for instance, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances—known as PFAS (aka “forever chemicals")—usually would be so low that it would take exposure over time to see the negative effects, he explains. “But as soon as they can, consumers should go back to drinking bottled water that does not have these issues.”

Tobie Stanger

Tobie Stanger is a senior editor at Consumer Reports, where she has been helping readers shop wisely, save money, and avoid scams for more than 30 years. Most recently, her home- and shopping-related beats have included appliance and grocery stores, generators, homeowners and flood insurance, humidifiers, lawn mowers, and luggage—she also covers home improvement products like flooring, roofing, and siding. During off-hours, she works on her own fixer-upper and gets her hands dirty in the garden. Follow her on Twitter @TobieStanger.