When All Hell Breaks Loose: Stuff You Need to Survive When Disaster Strikes

by Cody Lundin

  Early efforts at sanitation, at least for the wealthy, have been traced back as early as 3300 BC to the Mesopotamians, with the Greeks, Romans, and others following suit. For the "common man," going to the john usually meant something different. For early Romans, it was routine to throw the contents of the chamber pot out the window and onto the street the next morning. Countless supposedly advanced civilizations had for the most part no clue about proper sanitation. Many cultures simply pooped in unhygienic pits or threw the contents of their primitive privies over the walls of towns and cities. Medieval Paris had to extend its protective city walls as the pile of poop had grown so tall outside the original wall that invaders could climb the pile and attack the city. The thousands of pounds of excrement dumped into rivers even stopped some of them from flowing. Needless to say, the smell of many medieval towns and cities was totally obnoxious and dangerously unsanitary. It wasn't until the mid-1800s with the likes of potty pioneers Thomas Twyford, Thomas Crapper, and George Jennings that improvements in the toilet and sanitation started to create less of a stink.

  A lack of sanitation facilities following a major disaster can quickly create disease epidemics unless basic guidelines are followed. Unfortunately, modern urbanites have an "out of sight, out of mind" mentality regarding the aftermath of going to the bathroom. We have grown accustomed to doing our duty, hitting a lever, and letting someone else deal with our shit, literally and figuratively. Sooner or later, however, similar to one who blames other people or circumstances for his or her troubles, our waste products will catch up with us to be redeemed.

  The average person produces two to three pints of urine and one pound of feces every day. Imagine your family's toilet after one day of use without the ability to get rid of its contents. Besides rating high on the gross-o-meter, it's a great way to get your entire family sick, especially during the warm season. As clean as your family might be, the truth is, flies, pests, and pets love poop and will stop at virtually nothing to partake in the feast. After dining on your turd, flies won't think twice about landing upon your sandwich or whatever survival cuisine you may be enjoying at the moment. The ensuing results from fecalborne pathogens can be disastrous to you and your loved ones' health.

  P[ee]P[ee] and D[oo]D[oo]: Decisively Dealing with Dangerous Dung

  Over the years I have ushered hundreds of people into the wilderness for survival and primitive living skills courses. Within hours of our arrival at our backcountry home, we discuss the nature of doing one's business in nature. These helpful hints are just as applicable in your backyard as they are out in the woods. Use the "PPDD" formula as ground rules for the toilet options discussed later in this chapter.

  PPDD Stands for Privacy, Proximity, Depth, and Drainage

  Privacy

  Unless your potty plan produces privacy on the part of the participant, you will quickly fall from grace within your family. The last thing that anyone needs during a survival scenario is to be stressed out about where to go to the toilet. Undo stress and concern about being seen while going to the bathroom can psychologically and physiologically cause a person to "bind up" inside, preventing a bowel movement through constipation. Unless this is remedied, your loved one may become impacted, forcing a kind of kinship better left to the imagination and the virtues of a rubber glove. Along with providing privacy, tell your loved ones to RELAX and consciously think about the process while doing the job. If they are tense or strain, the sphincter muscles contract and make evacuation more difficult. This, along with squatting to keep the sigmoid colon properly aligned (outlined later) and adequate roughage in the diet should do the trick. Once again, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of. . .well, you get the picture. A simple tarp or other barrier might be all that is required to have your family pooping in peace.

  Proximity

  I have had people get lost in the woods while looking for the perfect private haven to go to the toilet. They walk so long and so far that, upon their return trip, they become disoriented from camp—an embarrassing predicament at the very least. While this point might not be applicable for your situation, make certain that your place of business is located within the realm of your loved ones finding their way back to the house. Stress, fear, darkness, weather, or other variables might make your backyard or back lot trip a bit more challenging than usual. Having a designated place to go to the bathroom that is private will prevent a person's instinct to wander until they find a spot in which they feel safe.

  Depth

  According to the U.S. Forest Service, one should dig a small hole at least twelve inches deep to poop in. Doing so in most of the state of Arizona will require a backhoe due to incredibly hard desert earth. Sometimes, in remote areas during intense desert heat, I leave scat uncovered; it gets baked by the desert sun and decomposes much more rapidly than if covered. In this case, I am on a cross-country hiking course and am permanently leaving the area and the fly connection. For our urban/suburban purposes, plan on covering your poop. There are a few different applications in regards to the depth and the size of the hole, which I'll cover later in the chapter.

  Drainage

  Poor sanitation habits are stereotyped to be the curse of developing countries and their largely "uncivilized" population. Recent history has proved otherwise. The Serbian/Croatian conflict mentioned earlier is case in point. Unfortunate families downstream from the upstream poopers bore the brunt of the effects. Entire families became ill due to fecal pathogens as rampant dysentery ruled day and night. People tried to keep clean by washing themselves in the flowing water, further exacerbating the problem. Many babies, small children, and a few adults died as a result.

  If a drainage or low spot on your property doesn't contain water, sooner or later, after a heavy rainfall, it will. Ample rainfall will cause drainages to flow, and the flow will be dictated by our friend gravity. Many dry washes or arroyos in the Southwest become dangerous killers as summer monsoon storms cause powerful flashfloods, washing away cars, cows, and campers.

  It's tempting for some to go potty in drainages, as excess vegetation caused by extra groundwater enables one to squat with some semblance of privacy. Pathogens in fecal matter can travel more than three hundred feet through the earth, thereby contaminating above- and below-groundwater sources with a bevy of nasty things.

  If you go potty in that private little wash in the back of your property, when it does flow you risk infecting your neighborhood with the gift that keeps on giving. Think like a raindrop when you decide where to station the outhouse—your family and neighbors will thank you.

  Using Your Existing Toilet

  If the water mains are broken, it's still possible to use your indoor toilet with no water in the back tank. Before doing the following suggestion, make sure there is no problem with the local sewer mains! Flushing your toilet when the town's sewer infrastructure is in pieces will further complicate your locality's sanitation emergency. Eventually radio or some other media will broadcast bulletins concerning the status of your sewer lines and whether it is safe to flush.

  After going to the bathroom, pour water into the toilet bowl itself (not the tank in the back) from a five-gallon bucket or other large container and your toilet will flush. Obviously, use this method only if water is an abundant resource.

  If for some reason your toilet cannot be flushed you can still use it for the seat that it is. First, remove the water from the bowl. Next, tape or otherwise anchor a heavy-duty plastic bag (I would double the bags) under the toilet seat and let the bag fill the cavity of the bowl. After the bag is comfortably full (two-thirds at most), untape the bag, add a small amount of powdered disinfectant like wood ashes or quicklime, tie it very securely, and place it within a preprepared slit trench or durable container such as a plastic five-gallon bucket (lined with a trash bag) or a trash container (lined with a trash bag) with a tight-fitting lid. Don't be cheap and have too much poop in the bag or it will be a living nightmare to tie up and dispose of.

&
nbsp; The Five-Gallon Bucket

  I love five-gallon buckets as they have endless uses. They are containers, and hunting and gathering cultures around the world evolved around the container and how it could be used, from carrying food and water to babies and bedding. Have several buckets on hand and keep the plastic ones out of the sun so they don't prematurely deteriorate and crack and fall apart.

  Five-gallon buckets lined with a couple of heavy-duty plastic bags can be used as portable toilets indoors or outside. When the bag is too full for comfort, tie it off securely and dispose of it in a preprepared slit trench or secure container for disposal when your emergency is over. Some camping stores sell buckets complete with a toilet-seat lid, custom-made for going to the bathroom. Sitting on the uncomfortable rim of the bucket can be dealt with by laying a couple of boards across the bucket's top and pooping in between the boards. At the onset of an emergency, any container will do that has a cover and will hold the contents until you can dispose of it. Many varieties of sanitizing chemical packets and disinfectants can be purchased from camping and RV stores and can be added to the contents of the bucket.

  Basic Backyard Bathrooms: A Potty Primer

  You would be amazed at how many people have never gone to the bathroom outdoors. If you are one of those amazing people, no problem, there's always a new day and another opportunity! The following outdoor recommendations are basic, yet tried and true.

  Most families have a variety of options to deal with human waste after a grid meltdown, especially those with access to a little bare ground in the backyard or elsewhere. Extreme caution should be used in areas where the groundwater table is high; raw sewage can easily infect underground water supplies, wells, springs, creeks, rivers, and lakes. If possible, locate your trench WELL AWAY from all potential water sources, above and below ground. The United States Forest Service recommends a minimum of two hundred feet between your poop site and any open water source. (Consider this a bare minimum, as waterborne pathogens have been known to travel more than three hundred feet to contaminate above- and below-groundwater sources.) Nevertheless, if your yard's topography directs rainfall runoff through the latrine, and then into the stream, rethink your location regardless of the two-hundred-foot rule. Fierce storms can dump amazing amounts of rain in a very short time. After the carnage, it's easy to study the ground and see where the next storm's runoff water will go by the tiny and sometimes not so tiny ravines created by the initial storm.

  Use common sense, and wherever you go to the bathroom, think like a raindrop and visualize the area covered with water and notice where the flow would go. There may be times, due to the right topography, that you'll be fine having a cat hole fifty feet or so from water, especially if it's used for only a few days. If you're unable to safely dig cat holes or pit trenches, don't bury your human waste. Store it instead on the premises in containers with tight-fitting lids. I'll talk more about this type of containment later.

  The Slit Trench

  If you have the space and the time, a slit trench is a great way for the family to unload its troubles in a contained manner with minimal potential for sanitation problems. Slit trenches take more effort to create than cat holes but can be used for extended periods of time and by larger families.

  The Cat Hole

  The cat-hole method speaks for itself with a few human, sanitary considerations thrown in. The next time Whiskers or Fluffy takes a dump, notice what they do. First, they find a diggable area which meets their psychological profile regarding privacy. Next, they dig the hole, do their business, and bury the results. Cat holes are good for single uses or more. Posthole diggers are marvelous for efficiently excavating fairly deep pilot holes good for several poops. Manual or mechanical augers, if available, are even better.

  You will be squatting to go to the bathroom for both slit trenches and cat holes. Get used to this thought now. If need be, you can always improvise something to sit on to suspend your derriere over the hole. If family members are older, have bad knees, or some other physical disability, you can creatively build things out of 2×4s or knock out the bottom of a chair to support a butt over slit trenches and cat holes.

  A Word on "Squatting"

  * * *

  SAVVY SQUATTING STRATEGIES

  1 Have your heels higher than your toes. Put rocks or boards under your heels, squat on a slope, etc.

  2 If helpful, stretch beforehand to help loosen tight muscles. Go ahead and laugh. . .until the night you have dysentery over your trench.

  3 If wearing shorts or pants, take off one leg, or better yet, take them off completely before squatting. This provides greater mobility, lessens the need for accuracy, and eliminates the stress of crapping on your clothes. Dresses are wonderful for squatting and can provide some semblance of privacy when going to the bathroom in less than private scenarios. Take off your underwear and simply lift the dress up, bunching it around your waist. Men can do the same with kilts—how can a 250-pound, axe-wielding Scottish warrior be a sissy?

  4 Anchor some type of grab bar such as posts, a suspended rope, or have your trench near a helpful bush or tree limb to hold onto to assist you in getting back into a standing position. Grab bars are critical for obese, elderly, or physically impaired family members.

  * * *

  Unless you're lucky enough to be a catcher for a baseball team, most Americans are not accustomed to squatting while going to the bathroom. If you have traveled to many locales on our planet, from India to Asia, the chances are high that you have already practiced squatting. Squatting properly positions the body more naturally, keeping the sigmoid colon in a more vertical position, and lets the abdominal cavity be supported by the tops of the thighs to help eliminate waste more efficiently.

  Conditions and Materials Needed to Construct a Slit Trench or Cat Hole

  1 The bodily need. If you have a large family or expect to be doing your business for an extended period of time, constructing a slit trench might be the best option. Cat holes work for short-time uses or smaller families, depending on how much land you have.

  2 Access to dry or moist (not wet) diggable ground that is safe from contaminating above- and below-groundwater sources and safe for access and use by all members of the family. If you have the opportunity and are thinking ahead, locate your trenches and cat holes around areas where your family's fecal matter will nourish the earth. Multiple cat holes around the perimeter of your fruit trees will fertilize the tree, thereby providing a more healthy and abundant crop in the future. Don't dig too close to the tree or you'll run into roots.

  3 Something to dig with. Shovels (and picks and digging bars in the case of most of the Southwest) and posthole diggers work well for creating a comfortable ca-ca cavity in most earth. If you own a small backhoe or garden tractor with an auger attachment, you'll be your neighborhood's best bathroom barter buddy.

  4 Privacy barriers. Unless your poo place has built-in privacy from fences, trees, shrubs, or whatever, plan on making Aunt Betty's potty practice pleasurable by erecting sheets, extra blankets, opaque tarps, or some other visibility barrier. Again, a word to the wise: If you fail to make your bathroom spot psychologically comfortable for the user, they won't use it. This can lead to uncomfortable results such as constipation and possible fecal compaction. Do you really want to know your family this well? Like everything else in this book, plan ahead and get to know your family's comfort zone now.

  5 Something to cover the poop and fill in the hole. Remember, flies and other critters, including many family dogs, love poop, so it's important to cover it over to decrease the possibility of problems. Your family can simply use the dirt that came out of the hole but flies can be aggressive little diggers. If you're worried about kids or pets rooting through the debris, get aggressive about blocking off the opening of the trench or hole with boards or something else. Wood ashes from your fireplace or woodstove or a thin layer of quicklime can also be used as cover. Both have somewhat disinfectant properties that not only
make it harder for flies to dig for the goodies but also provide a barrier that flies (and most pets) disagree with. Ashes and quicklime are also powderlike in their makeup, thus they cover poop thoroughly. Agricultural lime is much, much stronger than quicklime. Too much agricultural lime will disrupt the pH of the soil, affecting plant growth, depending on the ecosystem. If agricultural lime is all you have, cut it at a ratio of one tablespoon lime per five-gallon bucket of wood ashes.

  When your slit trench or cat hole is full (about a foot from the top), spread a thin layer of quicklime on the contents and fill it in with dirt.

  You'll have more dirt leftover because you've been adding poop to the hole. This is good as you want to mound up the dirt over the trench or cat hole as the earth will settle with time. When the trench is full, walk on the mound to pack the earth down.

  After the Turd

  Your colon is empty, the results have been safely buried, and life is looking up. . .now what? Before you make everyone a survival sandwich or hug the baby, it's time to take action about washing your hands. I always wipe my butt with the same hand, but I thoroughly wash both. Hand washing is critical, especially in group scenarios, as the majority of sanitary health problems and kitchen cases of food poisoning are a direct result of improper food handling by kitchen workers with unclean hands. Always stock waterless hand sanitizer (usually an alcohol base) in your bathroom whether or not you have a water-washing option available; water may be hard to come by at some point in your ordeal. At my water-miser homestead, I use waterless hand sanitizer full time in the bathroom. Put one or two squirts into the palm of your hand and briskly rub your hands together until the sanitizer dissipates. If thirty seconds of brisk hand rubbing have passed and your hands are still wet with sanitizer, use less next time.