survivors 1975-77

"David" wrote in message
...

"Roderick Stewart" wrote in
message .myzen.co.uk...

Where would you get drinkable water in a dead city? Bottles in
supermarkets
wouldn't last very long after it stopped coming out of the taps. You'd
have to
move to the country to find a clear stream.
Rod.

Tanks in attics, swimming pools, a variety of sources ... but whether in
city or country any water would still have to be filtered and purified,
most likely by boiling but possibly by addition of chemicals such as clear
thin bleech if you had it, iodine extracted from seaweed, etc.

You can make a simple filter from a bucket with a hole in the bottom
filled with layers of small stones up to grit until to fine sand.
Pour dirty water in at the top, relatively clean comes out the bottom

Steve Terry

"Steve Terry" wrote in message
...

Tanks in attics, swimming pools, a variety of sources ... but whether in
city or country any water would still have to be filtered and purified,
most likely by boiling but possibly by addition of chemicals such as
clear thin bleech if you had it, iodine extracted from seaweed, etc.

You can make a simple filter from a bucket with a hole in the bottom
filled with layers of small stones up to grit until to fine sand.
Pour dirty water in at the top, relatively clean comes out the bottom

Steve Terry
You can improve that with a piece of permeable cloth in the bottom over the
hole and one on the top and layers of charcoal between the grit amd sand.
The grit/sand is the basic filter, the charcoal takes out some chemicals,
the cloth on the bottom keeps some dirt out of the finished product and the
one on top makes it easy to remove the biggest pieces of particulate matter
in the raw water. For longer term or larger group use you can create a
bigger version in a 55 gallon drum or old water tank. For a portable version
cut the bottom off a 1 litre drinks bottle and fill it spout end down. At
best though filtering will only remove dirt, some chemicals and larger
organisms, the water that comes out will still need to be boiled and/or
treated chemically to kill bacteria.

Steve Terry wrote:
"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Steve Terry wrote:
But with literally millions of them , charging them regularly you'd
have a limitless supply for many decades. I've had batteries last
nearly ten years in my old vans . Get a new one off the shelf in a car
parts place , charge it up , use it a few hours a day and it'll last a
decade I reckon.


Nope, new ones are supplied dry charged empty, and start degrading
when filled with sulphuric acid / deionised water, so store them unfilled
as supplied to dealers
Are you saying Halfords add the electrolyte on the premises? Because all
their batteries on display are ready to go. Same with most others these
days. Or rather has been for the last couple of car batteries I've bought.
Last 'dry' stored battery I bought and had to wait while it was filled was
a Lucas. ;-) And from a motor factor.


The warehouses supplying Halfords, etc, store them in dry charged state.
Those would be the places to recover batteries from.
I used to deal with one just west of Brighton, an Aladdin's cave of new
car batteries.

Just the sort of place that would have a turf war after an apocalypse

Steve Terry



Only if the plebs knew where to look - whilst they'd be raiding the off
license we'd be down there with a military lorry!

David wrote:
"Steve Terry" wrote in message
...
Tanks in attics, swimming pools, a variety of sources ... but whether in
city or country any water would still have to be filtered and purified,
most likely by boiling but possibly by addition of chemicals such as
clear thin bleech if you had it, iodine extracted from seaweed, etc.

You can make a simple filter from a bucket with a hole in the bottom
filled with layers of small stones up to grit until to fine sand.
Pour dirty water in at the top, relatively clean comes out the bottom

Steve Terry
You can improve that with a piece of permeable cloth in the bottom over the
hole and one on the top and layers of charcoal between the grit amd sand.
The grit/sand is the basic filter, the charcoal takes out some chemicals,
the cloth on the bottom keeps some dirt out of the finished product and the
one on top makes it easy to remove the biggest pieces of particulate matter
in the raw water. For longer term or larger group use you can create a
bigger version in a 55 gallon drum or old water tank. For a portable version
cut the bottom off a 1 litre drinks bottle and fill it spout end down. At
best though filtering will only remove dirt, some chemicals and larger
organisms, the water that comes out will still need to be boiled and/or
treated chemically to kill bacteria.



A good idea for river & canal water prior to sterilising /boiling or
perhpas for water for washing etc rather than cooking /eating. Rainwater
collection might be better for drinking water as it might need less
cleaning and only a sterilising tablet in. Though I'm reminded of the
bloke in 28 days later waiting for rain, you'd need loads of water butts
and a pumping or storage system.

This is where moving to the country and finding a natural well or spring
would be the solution or vast amounts of time are going to be taken up
with sterilising and collecting water.

Funnily enough a story on the BBC site caught my eye - emergency
preparation leaflets!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/g...re/8165859.stm

On Tue, 21 Jul 2009 06:12:00 +0100, Steve Terry wrote:

From the dark ages onwards it was monks in monasteries, i'm sure we'd be
able to do better than that.

Was not the problem the imposition of the feudal system, the groundwork of
which had been laid in the late period of the Roman empire, most importantly
with Constantine promulgation of a law in AD 332 which bound all coloni to
the state as serfs?

See also "The economic laws of scientific research" by Terence Kealey

http://books.google.COM/books?id=tKJuIBtjpvsC&dq=Terence+Kealey&printsec=f rontcover&source=an&hl=en&ei=dc5sSoC0GNOMjAfEk_ieC w&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4

but be advised that the author is a hard core libertarian.

On Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:37:43 +0100, Steve Terry wrote:

It takes a gov with drive and vision to make it happen, if Franco was
running Britain you can be sure the Seven estuary tidal power barrier
would have been built

And if Mussolini was running Britain, the trains would run on time,
and if Hitler was running Britain, there would be high speed autobahns
etc etc.

Whereas in France with a democratically elected government and head
of state, there are high speed train services to all the major points
of the compass and the electricity is generated primarily from nuclear
power.

There is no need for a fascist leader to get well designed engineering
systems built.

"J G Miller" wrote in message
news
On Tue, 21 Jul 2009 06:12:00 +0100, Steve Terry wrote:

From the dark ages onwards it was monks in monasteries, i'm sure we'd
be
able to do better than that.

Was not the problem the imposition of the feudal system, the groundwork of
which had been laid in the late period of the Roman empire, most
importantly
with Constantine promulgation of a law in AD 332 which bound all coloni to
the state as serfs?

See also "The economic laws of scientific research" by Terence Kealey

http://books.google.COM/books?id=tKJuIBtjpvsC&dq=Terence+Kealey&printsec=f rontcover&source=an&hl=en&ei=dc5sSoC0GNOMjAfEk_ieC w&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4



The black death of the mid 15th century completely eliminated serfdom.
Simple supply and demand, suddenly there was a lot more demand than supply
of labour

Steve Terry

"J G Miller" wrote in message
news
On Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:37:43 +0100, Steve Terry wrote:

It takes a gov with drive and vision to make it happen, if Franco was
running Britain you can be sure the Seven estuary tidal power barrier
would have been built

And if Mussolini was running Britain, the trains would run on time,
and if Hitler was running Britain, there would be high speed autobahns
etc etc.

Whereas in France with a democratically elected government and head
of state, there are high speed train services to all the major points
of the compass and the electricity is generated primarily from nuclear
power.

There is no need for a fascist leader to get well designed engineering
systems built.


I agree, I'm only saying it takes a Gov with vision and drive to get big
projects done

Not something we've had here since Clem Attlee and Bevin

Steve Terry

Edster writes:

: Also, all the stored recources would be heavily guarded by whoever
: found them first, or would be in large cities full of rotting
: corpses/typhoid, etc. Both topics that were covered in the original.

The recurring excuse as to why all the resources in the cities and
larger towns were inaccessible was that rats had overrun the cities due
to the food supply of the corpses. However, it seemed to me that what
with the life cycle of rats, that should hold for only about three
years. After that, the rats' new food supply should have been used up.
The original series treated the urban rat problem as something that made
it permanently impossible to go in the cities.

I remember the original series as wonderfully provocative. It would get
people thinking and talking just like this thread has. But when it came
to the specifics, it was hard to swallow some of the things they came up
with. For one thing, it seemed like the main characters were always
trusting people they shouldn't trust, and distrusting people they should
trust.

-Micky

Roderick Stewart writes:

: And in a society that has been so reduced and fragmented that their
: most pressing concerns are fresh water, food and somewhere warm to
: stay, who is going to teach the next few generations to read books?

Passing on the ability to read would be the one crucial link to not
completely rendering the knowledge from the previous millennia useless.
However, in the original series, they appointed one guy to teach the
commune's children, and in the first day, he threw in the towel, because
he chose to read from a book about the history of ancient Rome, or
something like that, and he felt like the whole concept of "school" was
irrelevant to these children's lives.

-Micky