by Cody Lundin
Flies, other pests, and the family dog love poop and will transfer dangerous fecalborne pathogens to family members if given a chance. All fecal matter should be thoroughly covered!
Use the PPDD method (privacy, proximity, drainage, and depth) when planning the location for your outdoor potty place. All outdoor pit toilets should be located at least 200 feet from all water sources!
Slit trenches and cat holes, two basic styles of alternative pit toilets, can be created with a pick or shovel in suitable ground. These styles of toilets will require you to squat to go to the bathroom unless a seat is improvised. Privacy barriers can be created from an extra blanket or tarp. Discontinue using slit trenches and cat holes when they fill up to within ten to twelve inches from the top of the ground. Fill them in with earth and pack it down.
Existing toilets in the home can be used by pouring water into the bowl itself to flush. Warning! If using this method, make certain that your area's sewer lines are intact! The existing toilet can also be used as a "seat" by suspending and anchoring doubled-up plastic bags into the empty bowl itself. Partially filled bags with added disinfectant are then tied up securely and disposed of in a safe location.
Important! Adequate hand washing is the single most important procedure for preventing the spread of infections. Thoroughly wash hands after going to the bathroom. Chlorine bleach-dip solutions, antibacterial soaps, and alcohol-based waterless hand sanitizers can be used in conjunction with the mechanics of proper hand washing.
If burying waste products is not an option, use containers with tight-fitting lids such as five-gallon buckets or garbage cans to safely store waste products temporarily. Garbage cans should be thoroughly staked down to prevent them from being knocked over.
Toilet paper can be improvised from newspaper, magazines, and rags, as well as an assortment of outdoor options such as grass, leaves, sticks, and rocks.
Have sanitation supplies on hand to improvise emergency sanitation needs such as digging tools, five-gallon buckets, chlorine bleach, toilet paper, hand sanitizers, plastic trash bags with ties, old newspapers, plastic sheeting, and antibacterial soap.
16
HELPFUL Highlights of HYGIENE
"Keep your own house and its surrounding pure and clean. This hygiene will keep you healthy and benefit your worldly life."
—Sri Sathya Sai Baba
The following are tips to help keep your family reasonably clean when conventional means for doing so have disappeared. Attempting to continue regular hygiene habits will help prevent the spread of disease, increase morale, and offer a predictable routine, thereby reducing stress.
The Amazing Towel Bath:
Four Simple Steps to a Cleaner You and a Better Attitude
Let's face it, life sucks with a smelly crotch and armpits. Eating the can of survival beans next to Uncle Ted's wafting pelt can be a trying experience for the wee ones as well as the older members of the family. I remember my grandmother (one of seven kids) cringing as she told me the story about her bathing experiences on the old South Dakota homestead. Once a week her mother would fill a washtub with water heated on the woodstove. Then, one by one, the entire family would take turns bathing in the same water. The littlest kids went first, often peeing in the water. On the bright side, maybe it kept the water warmer longer.
It's amazing how a somewhat clean body can have a positive effect on your attitude. If survival situations become long term and really grubby, "cooties" can get out of control and offer up a number of skin infections that are no fun to deal with. Crowded shelters, especially during hot, humid weather, can cause skin diseases to flourish. It's very important to wash off sweat and dead skin cells from your body. In sticky, humid weather, these skin cells will stay on your body and start to decay. At the same time, bathing with soap too often washes off normal skin oils and can cause the skin to prematurely dry out and crack, especially in dry, cold environments.
While emergency scenarios can put a damper on supplies, especially hot water, with a little ingenuity, your family can feel like half a million bucks with minimal effort. In the past, my solar shower experiences have been more of an experiment than a shower during the winter months. Thus I have become well-versed in perfecting the towel or sponge bath, as some prefer to call it.
The following recipe for cleanliness is good for one adult.
Ingredients:
Heat source to boil water
Medium-sized pot or container
One-half quart, give or take, of potable or nonpotable water
One medium-sized hand towel, large kitchen towel, large clean shirt, or whatever
Your naked, smelly body
Directions:
1 Put water in pot, cover with lid, and begin to bring to boil on heat source. Using a lid will save fuel, time, and water.
2 Check frequently. As water starts to steam and form small bubbles at bottom of pot, remove pot from heat source. (*see Tried and True Towel Tips below.)
3 Slowly and carefully immerse towel into pot. Move towel around slightly to let capillary action of cloth wick up hot water. If towel is completely saturated, use less water next time as a fully wet towel will be too hot to pick up, let alone wring out, and it will drip all over the place.
4 When towel is very hot but not too hot to handle (**see Tried and True Towel Tips), pick up towel and vigorously wash body.
I like to start with my face (washing long hair is a separate event, folks), and then my arms and torso, back, legs, armpits, and the crotch last. I use every part of the towel, front and back, being careful not to rework the crotch part of the towel over some other part of my body. Believe it or not, I then take the towel, crotch part folded in the middle, and spot mop the floor of my house. While this may seem extreme to many water-rich parts of the country, I can sense my fellow desert rats and rain harvesters nodding in approval. Regardless of your mopping the floor with your towel or not, the towel is now dirty and should be laundered or at least sun-washed before future use (***see Tried and True Towel Tips).
Tried and True Towel Tips:
*Fully boiling the water will make it too hot for immediate use, but if you're bathing with funky, nonpotable water, you may choose to boil the water for one minute or at least bring it to a boil to ensure the destruction of weird, waterborne pathogens.
**The towel will transform from being too hot to handle to cool within a phenomenally short amount of time so move with speed!
***The more you encourage your loved ones, especially the kiddies, to wipe and clean their butt cracks with something disposable before wiping it with the towel, the easier it will be to clean the towel for future use and make certain that it's properly disinfected. Washcloths, underwear, socks, and other high-use items can be disinfected by putting them into boiling water for a minute or two. Disinfecting these items, not just washing them, is the most important health objective under difficult shelter conditions. Unless plenty of water is available for rinsing, don't disinfect clothing by putting it in a chlorine bleach solution. Also, see the sun-washing section later in this chapter.
Spiffy Spray Bottle Showers
Spray bottles can be made into improvised showers allowing you to use very small amounts of water for bathing. Many household goods come in a spray bottle or they can be purchased new at most hardware stores. If you choose to recycle a spray bottle for use as a shower, don't choose one that held bug poison or some other toxic goo. Clean and rinse out the bottle thoroughly. Most spray bottles have an adjustable spout that will let you choose from a fine mist to a squirt-gunlike stream depending upon your needs. Fill up your bottle with warm water or set it in the sun. Bottles can be painted a dark color to speed up the absorption of shortwave radiation from the sun to heat up the water, but the smaller size of most bottles usually makes this unnecessary. Next, get naked, and in an appropriate place, use a combination of spraying and wiping with a rag or small towel to get clean.
The Super-Sized Spray Bottle Shower
Greasy Hair
To temporarily clean greasy hair, try rubbing small amounts of baby powder into the scalp and hair. Any extra should be brushed or combed out. Visually, this method works best for blondes, as dark-haired people might look like they have a wicked case of dandruff—but who cares if you're more comfortable. Baby powder is a cover-up and doesn't deal with the cause of greasy hair, but it helps to stretch out the time between rare showers, if need be.
Temporary Toothbrushes
New toothbrushes are dirt cheap, so having a few spares around the house is easy. When they wear out for humans, they're still great for cleaning stuff. The following are options for keeping teeth clean in a crisis. Toothpaste is overrated. I haven't used it for nearly twenty years and four out of five dentists surveyed say I have great teeth. Here are some toothbrush and toothpaste substitutes:
Fabric, rags, or washcloths and baking soda. Pioneer folks, including my grandparents, used wet pieces of fabric (hand towels work great) with salt or baking soda (toothpaste substitute) and simply rubbed their teeth and gums clean.
Willow (Salix species) or cottonwood (Populous species). Willows and cottonwoods contain salicin and populin, ingredients in aspirin that also double as a great plaque fighter. Simply cut a fresh twig of either about as big around as a pencil and chew the end until it's fuzzy. Use this as your toothbrush and scrub away. At first, both have a slightly bitter taste but it's not all that disagreeable; some people even like it.
Dental floss is very hard to duplicate in nature. I have used fibers of yucca and agave plants here in the Southwest but if your teeth are "tight," forget it. I think we have all experienced the agony of having something wedged in between the teeth. You may also be eating who knows what as part of your survival diet in which floss rates higher than dessert. In my first book, I pay homage to the multiuse virtues of dental floss and always carry some in my survival kit. Follow the advice and have some extra floss around the house.
Worthwhile Waterless Washing
If water is hard to come by, externally smelly areas of the body such as crotches, armpits, and feet can be dealt with using a variety of alcohol-based products and a paper towel or rag. While not truly getting you clean from dirt, the alcohol kills the critters that cause the stink instead of just masking the smell with a fragrance. In my dubious water situation, I commonly use waterless hand sanitizer to knock down the funk factor and it works wonderfully. Funky smells are not only a real romance killer, they are also harbingers of skin diseases ready to manifest themselves and should be dealt with seriously. Obese friends and family members may have the same bacterial buildup between the folds and rolls of their fat, caused by no light and high-moisture conditions. Help them keep as clean as possible through regular methods or wiping with one of the following alcohol products. Like mom does for baby, high-moisture areas can be treated and kept dry by using baby powder or cornstarch to absorb excess moisture.
* * *
SELF-CLEANING CLOTHING?
"During Desert Storm most casualties were from bacterial infections rather than from accidents or friendly fire. We have treated T-shirts and underwear for soldiers who tested them for several weeks and found that they remained hygienic, as the clothing was actively killing the bacteria. They also helped clear up some skin complaints in those testing them."
—Jeff Owens, scientist, U.S. Air Force
Scientists have created a coating that repels water, resists stains, and even kills many of the bacteria in human sweat that cause odors. While the clothing would still need to be laundered, it would need to be washed much less often and would wash much easier. The technology involves using microwaves to fix microscopic nanoparticles, which have "attached" chemical properties such as water repellency or the destruction of bacteria, to clothing fibers. Although the coating wears off over time, makers claim it can be restored by soaking the material in a fresh solution of the same chemicals.
U.S. Air Force scientists initially became involved in the research in hopes that soldiers' clothing could offer protection during biological warfare. Initial tests discovered that the process could kill anthrax and other weaponized bacteria.
The coating, especially its antibacterial properties, could revolutionize sports and backpacking clothing as well as offer hundreds of other possibilities, from hospital bedding, doctor and nurses' uniforms, and chefs' aprons to air conditioning filters on planes and cruise ships.
* * *
Rubbing alcohol. This is very drying to the skin so use sparingly and stop if problems arise
Lotions containing alcohol
Shaving lotions and face creams
Baby towelettes
Waterless hand sanitizer
Super Sun-washing
While doing the laundry is not a disaster priority, I'll share the following tip nevertheless. Between extended field courses in outdoor survival and unique living situations for the majority of my life, I have found myself at times unable to do the laundry. Professional slobs will tell you that there are various levels of "dirty" that clothing can become before it should be burned. Most urban folks don't have dirty clothes at all as there is no dirt to dirty them within their environment. The majority of metropolitan dirty clothes are unclean due to perspiration and sloughed dead skin cells from the owner. Add cigarette smoke, pungent food odors, stains from Al's Garlic Deli, and animal hair from the family pet, and that usually rounds out the equation. Unclean, yes, but dirty? I don't think so.
As the fabric of your clothing continues to take on your dead epidermis and glandular fluids, the fibers become clogged and the dead air space, or insulation value of the clothing, starts to decrease. For nearly two decades, I have experimented with wearing the same shirt for several days unless it becomes dirty, i.e. caked with earth, weeds, or something else picked up in the backcountry. I'm so sensitive to this routine that I can literally feel the increased insulation value of a clean T-shirt as opposed to a dirty one. In other words, if it's cold outside, I feel warmer with a fresh shirt. Remember, clean clothing is a plus if your survival situation happens when it's cold.
If you have to wear your shirt for two or three days, take it off and shake it occasionally. If you shake it vigorously in a beam of sunlight, you will witness a small cloud of skin particles waft off the fabric. Clothing that is worn for days on end with no cleaning can cause various skin rashes and problems, and that is in addition to its losing its insulation value and you looking like hell. There is a direct relationship between these skin problems and the "skin dirt" from your body lingering in the dark, humid environment of your clothing.
As we now know, sunlight contains ultraviolet radiation, which, if given enough time and in the right concentration, is used to kill entire legions of waterborne pathogens in orde
r to make nonpotable water potable. These same disinfecting benefits of ultraviolet radiation can also work wonders on the "yuck" within the fabric of your clothing. The more potent the sunlight, the better and faster the following method will work.
1 Gather up dirty articles of clothing (or your sleeping bag, blankets, etc.), turn them inside out, take them outdoors, and vigorously shake out each one.
2 Spread out clothing in full sun, off the ground if possible, on a bush, a fence, a porch, or something else. The more the entire surface area of the fabric is exposed to direct sunlight, the better.
3 If you're tight for time or sunlight or both, flip the article of clothing in the middle of the day. If time is not an issue and you have a few days of good sun, you might leave one side of the clothing exposed for an entire day and flip it in the morning.
4 How much sunlight your wardrobe requires depends on the intensity of the sun in your area, how much time you have, and how fussy you are. A hot summer day here in the Southwest will "clean" a shirt in a few hours. A sun-washed garment will both smell and feel cleaner, as the ultraviolet radiation has cooked many of the critters that revel in your sweat and dead skin cells.
Decisively Dealing with Dead Bodies
Even the best survival plans can fail. One of the most difficult circumstances you may be forced to deal with is the death of a loved one or someone else. Although it takes much courage to do so, especially if the dead person is a family member, you may be required to cowboy up and dispose of the body yourself for a number of reasons during or after a major crisis.