this. This this show is brought to you by safety FM. Warning. The following broadcast contains adult language, adult content, frank safety discussions and stories that might sound unbelievable. But believe me, every one of those stories is true. We didn't start the safety war, but we are going to fight to win it for our families, for our communities, for our workplaces and for our lives. Just when I thought I would not have anything to discuss about water with disaster preparation, all the stuff hits this week about Mississippi. We really haven't heard too much about Mississippi and the water quality. About 150,000 residents without reliable without a reliable water supply where they have low water pressure, then contaminated water. And it's a big mess over there. You could google it and the other one is in my home state of new york again with arsenic in a new york city apartment building. So we have for review, we have four different scenarios we have to deal with when preparing for a disaster. This is how I describe them. I haven't seen this described any other way. You have your immediate disaster. Category one from 0 to 24 hours. Category two. From 24 to 72 or 96 hours. Then you have category three, which would be uh from 96 hours after about a month. And then you have category 4, 30 days out and more. So the government says you should have enough water for like three days, four days. That's that category two situation as I describe it. The problem with Mississippi is that it's been going on since the beginning of the summer with all the situations, they had floods, they had all different types of situations. And now how do you prepare for that? It's the middle of the summer. If anyone has been in Mississippi in the summer, it's hot, it's really hot. So now that one gallon of water that well let's back up a little bit. According to the mayo clinic, the average man needs about one gallon of water per day. Average woman a little bit less than that, So we'll just round it up to one gallon per person per day. And that's if you have a sedentary situation, that's not if you're not working, that's if you don't have any other major health problems which may preclude you from drinking water. For example, my father who recently passed away could not drink anymore then something like 40 oz of fluid a day and that included from his food because he was on dialysis, I don't know, you got to check with your medical provider on that and uh or if you're gonna be working harder, it's gonna be more or less, what have you got to prepare for it. So now let's do some back of the envelope calculations here, that means in a 30 day period you would have to have 30 gallons of water that is only for drinking, that's not for flushing the toilets, bathing, washing dishes, anything like that. So you're probably gonna need a lot more than that. That requires a lot more preparation. So what do people I know, do they have a supply of paper products, paper plates, plastic knives, and forks, things of that nature where they don't have to necessarily clean or wash dishes. That saves some water. But how much of this stuff are you really going to have something to consider Your source of water is your source of water for, let's say sanitary purposes, a swimming pool or maybe at the impending disaster. You were thinking ahead of time and you went and collected water. So, for example, if you had 55 gallon drums, um, in your, in your facility, clean ones for drinking or anything like that appropriate for carrying water, how long is it gonna take you to fill that up? Let's say you have a family of four living in a home, one gallon of water per person per day, that's four gallons, 30 days, that's 100 and 20 gallons just for drinking. Now, that's almost three, right, No, uh, 55 gallon drums. Pretty standard. Right, so three of them that comes out to 165 gallons. Now you're approaching here where you're over two of those drums, where you're gonna keep it, where you're going to store it, if you're living in an arid area, you may not be able to do that because of water restrictions that you know, you may be on? Well, water that might preclude you from gathering that much water in a short amount of time? Right. Uh so again, put it out for a month, that's 120 gallons. Let's say you're living? No. So I'm living in a house. Yeah. Do I have room for 120 gallons of water? Yeah, probably. What does this come down to? Well, a case of water is just under five gallons of water. So now you're dealing with no, five gallons of water. 100 and 20 gallons, that's 100 and 20 divided by five. That's a boatload of cases of water. Or if you do the math 24 cases of water for a month, where are you going to keep that? If you're in an apartment, you have room for 24 cases, how are you going to get it up there on short notice? That's something else you have to consider. Are you going to have storage of water on site? Okay, let's say you have an impending disaster, you have pretty good water flow, right, 80 or 90 P. S. I in the lines. Now you're able to get approximately one gallon per minute. So you're gonna need 100 and 25 gallons. That's 100 and 25 minutes, Just over two hours filling up water for one month. Alright, well that may not be uh in the professional safety, community communication and planning are just a few keys to your program success. The question many practitioners have is where do I start dr J Allen, the creator of the safety FM platform and host of the rated R. Safety show has built a global foundation to help you along the way go to safety FM dot com and listen to some of the industry's best and most involved professionals including Blaine Hoffman with the safety pro Sam Goodman with the Hop nerd Sheldon Primus with the safety consultant Jim proposal with C Safety Wars Emily L Rod with unapologetically bold and many others as individuals, we can do great things but as a team we become amazing dial into safety FM dot com today and surround yourself with a powerful force of knowledge and support you have. Now let's talk about cost. So you already have contaminated water. It's after the fact like a lot of these residents in Mississippi now you have another line item in your family budget, you're buying water and I can guarantee you there are people gouging for bottled water down there in Mississippi at least one person is out there gouging for water and that's just for drinking now for sanitation. What do you do? All of this stuff has to be worked out ahead of time. How much water where are you going to store it now? Let's uh are you gonna ration it now? Here's the other thing, there's a lot of advertisements out there for water treatment systems and I know full disclosure here, I used to sell water treatment systems for residential homes, no company will give you a guarantee of what the output is of those filters, even the best ones out there, because they can't know what you're putting through those filters. So when someone says, hey, use this filter and everything is filtered out, that's not necessarily true. One, that filter may be overloaded at a certain point. I may let contaminants through. The second thing to consider is that filter rated for the contaminants that you're dealing with in that water. Third thing is, what are you putting into it? Because what you're putting into it may impact what you're getting at on the other end? Are you, are you going to go and boil water for example, they always say boil water on to boil water alert and it's always seems to be, you know, maybe it's just coincidence that these boil water alerts happened when there's work being done on the water veins. It happened a lot to us last year we were on boiled water alerts, don't use it for cooking, don't use it for bathing, blah blah blah blah blah. All that goes into that. What are the proper procedures. How long are you gonna boil it? How are you going to boil it? Guess one of the major disaster, you may not have access to electric, you may not have access to gas. If you're working off a gas like propane or natural gas for your house, how are you gonna boil that? This is gonna be with wood. And we always get, I mentioned this a couple of weeks back security. Someone knows you have clean water, Someone knows that you have a way to purify water. There's a good chance that you now become a target and you made your situation worse. Who are you going to share that information with? What kind of security are you gonna have for around that? Are your neighbors trustworthy? I know I'll always favor keeping your mouth shut as to what your disaster preparations are and give it to whoever is appropriate to give it to friends, family, close friends, close family, what have you. These are the kinds of decisions that a lot of families had to go through 10 years ago with Superstorm Sandy here in the new york, New Jersey area where we are not used to the other with major disasters. Some areas of the country along the gulf coast in the Southeastern United States, they have hurricanes, They deal with a lot of this stuff all the time up here in the Northeast. If we have a snowstorm or something like that. Okay, we know how to deal with that pretty well. But a major disaster like Superstorm Sandy. Now you have the issue with this. Uh, some of my story here, we were living in a house in chestnut Ridge and the water treatment facility for Rockland County was flooded. So we couldn't drink the water using it for bathing was questionable but using it to flush the toilets, we were able to manage that. If we didn't, if we were unable to flush the toilets, that would have been a that would have been a major issue. Believe me now uh what do we do? We can't drink the water, We have plenty of bottled water. I said and I was newly wed. I said honey let's go and get every container that we have that can hold water including the garbage cans and let's fill them up with water. She said why? I said, well in case we lose water and now we have potable water to drink. I wouldn't drink it out of the garbage scan, but pots pans, glasses, pitchers, bowls, anything that can hold potable water, drinkable water. We have that way, if we could at least go and boil that purify it somehow we increase our chances of not having a problem. What's some other stuff to think about? Let's say that you're a first or second responder, first responder, we know E. M. T. S. Firefighters, uh Emergency services. Police, that sort of thing. Even in the military, they have a lot of this stuff worked out with water supplies, they know about how long it takes for you to get where you're going to need water. Things of that nature. Your second responder companies which are the ones I normally deal with those are your cleanup contractors, your uh maybe they're called in to help the first responders on something. A lot of those companies are not necessarily prepared for a water issue. So what's the rule of thumb? I always tell the responders for the first day of an emergency, always have water with you. You got the phone call, hey, I need you X, y and z, blah, blah, blah. Okay. Always have your water on hand for you for one day, which I would always say about two gallons of water. And if I'm going to choose between a large bottle of water, a large container of water for drinking water, I'm usually going to favor a smaller bottle of water this way, if something happens, something that's contaminated now you only have a little bit of contaminated water, not a big container contaminated water and you have basically the first four hours or five hours of a major emergency or even a minor one, an oil spill, things of that nature, I would consider you being 100% responsible for yourself as far as water, food, things of that nature. Once you, if you're a manager, once you start getting beyond the three and four hour mark, you need to decide and hopefully you have it planned out ahead of time, how are we going to get these people food water things of that nature. Now you may say, well, hey, they're going home at night. They're responsible for lunch, brown bag. That's all fair and good. But in a major disaster, you may not be able to do that. So now you have to figure out how you're actually going to feed these people. What's the bottom line for most of these disaster preparation episodes kind of plan things out, assess, analyze act, get a lot more education than what I'm giving you here. There are different methods of purifying water. There's different sources of water things of that nature. And like I said, the government requires two or is asking really two or three days, maybe four days worth of water in your house. I think that's doable for most people. Anything longer than that. You're gonna run into a situation and you got me have to get a little bit creative, We're gonna talk about food in our next program for safety worse. This is jim proposal is your safety training old stale and Hackney is your safety trainer still preaching a warped version of behavior based safety. How about safety training that actually addresses your hazards in your workplace is, and it's not standardized bologna from 25 years ago. Contact the safety ward's team at safety words dot com or call jim postal at 845 to 69577. To remember if you're receiving this message, you are the solution to unsafe workplaces. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the host and its guests, and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the company. Examples of analysis discussed within this podcast are only examples. It should not be utilized in the real world as the only solution available as they are based only on very limited and dated open source information, assumptions made within this analysis are not reflective of the position of the company. No part of this podcast may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means mechanical, electronic recording or otherwise without prior written permission of the creator of the podcast, J. Allen.