Not sure what you mean.
Worse still, that one flush is all you're going to get without pouring additional water into the bowl. This is colossally dumb - the last thing you want to waste is your water. Besides, all this implies that somehow, magically, the "away" that you flush your waste to is still there, and that the pipeline by which you flush things "away" still works. There is no guarantee.
What are you getting at?
There are a number of emergency toilets that you can buy on the open market, but all of them basically boil down to being a five-gallon drum with a plastic bag inside - this will work for a while, at least until you run out of plastic bags. If you're only willing to plan for a week's worth of disaster, and really that's the upshot of this blog series, then this is the way to go.
That being said, tying everything up in a plastic bag is fine so long as A) you have enough plastic bags and B) eventually you've got somewhere to put all those plastic bags. When you run out of plastic bags, or when the members of the sewer and water department are taken out and shot for their counter-revolutionary ideology, you're going to have to go in the yard.
Digging a real outhouse is well beyond the scope of this article - it's kind of a big deal, and a fairly involved construction project. It's a rather deep pit with a carefully calculated location away from the water table and wells, downwind of your location, it requires you to build a privy building (meaning you need lumber and nails) and you'll have to learn how to carve a crescent moon on the door, which is harder than it looks.
So no, you're not going to dig an outhouse - you're going to go out back and take a shovel with you. The deeper you can dig, the better - that hole has to be at least deep enough to accommodate the excreted mass plus any paper (you did stock up on toilet paper, right?) The hole also has to be narrow enough that you can squat over it without falling in - think deep and narrow. Think basically about the size of your toilet bowl.
After you're done, don't just fill that hole in - you'll need a masking agent. Cat owners, you're in luck: kitty litter will do. Unfortunately, you probably don't have enough litter for human use unless you buy it at Costco by the pallet. The best thing to cover up the stank of your post-apocalyptic doodie is lime.
How much lime should you use? As much as you need. Think about how offensive it is to see that someone didn't pick up after their dog - now multiply that by a factor of about a billion and you'll know how horribly repellent a pit of human waste is on a hot summer day (for those of us who have lived on farms, it's bearable, but again, this isn't really for the farm dweller - this is for the swinging suburbanite who just wants to survive a blackout).
So...football?
Lime is cheap, so don't scrimp - it's better to use too much than too little at first, and eventually you'll figure out how much you need.
But hygiene, cleanliness, waste, and personal care extend beyond just digging the most disgusting hole in the world. Just as your bathroom is more than a toilet, so too must your survival strategy include more concern for cleanliness.
Inorganic trash (packaging, broken electronics) is ugly to look at when it's strewn about your lawn, but it's not going to hurt anything. Keep anything you might be able to use, but exercise caution - you may be making a rat's nest. If you can't keep an eye on your discardables, then they are officially garbage to be gotten rid of, and you will either have to carry it far away from your home, or bury it.
The trash you need to be really careful about is naturally your own waste (described above in nauseating detail) and food waste. Bury your bones and bury them deep! It won't take long at all for raccoons, feral cats, stray dogs, and mutant dire bears to figure out where the delicious piles of bones and old meat are, and they'll come around with diseases, fangs, claws, and laser-eyes if they smell your empty spam cans. Plan on bi-weekly disposal of organic matter - if you're only planning for 5 days of emergency, then you can bag it up tight and put it in the garage. Longer term, you'll need to dig your own landfill - either one big pit very far away from your house (at least 1/4 mile minimum) or lots of little holes dug deep and buried like the privvy-pits described above.
Your back yard is so fucked.
I'm looking for a new suit, but...what?
All this handling of waste and garbage is going to get your hands awfully dirty, so a brief mention of personal hygiene is in order. If you know for a fact that the lights and water are only out for a couple days, suck it up and treat it like a camping trip - you'll be fine. If you think you're out of luck and nobody is coming to your rescue for a week or more - well, suck it up again, because you'll be fine. Daily showers are a really nice luxury, but you can live without them.
The most important thing to do is wash your hands, and to this end you should stock up on soap and sanitizer. I'm not a big proponent of sanitizer for daily use - I'm pretty sure it's in part responsible for the emergent super-bugs we're starting to see, and the stuff just smells like OCD in my opinion, but in an emergency it's absolutely life-saving. Wash your hands before handling any food, and after using your doodoo pits.
The other thing you need to keep clean is anywhere that's fungus-prone, namely your feet and your crotch. We're so used to showering every day to scrub away the deep, deep shame we feel every time we look in the mirror that our bodies natural defenses against skin infectants has been rendered feeble. In the long term, you'll go through a pretty rough and stinky patch of misery, but your body will eventually sort itself out in that department. For the short term, change your socks and underwear twice a day. Use baby powder or corn starch on your feet and junk to absorb excess moisture - only you can decide if you can spare water for washing, but the answer is probably no. If you run out of skivvies and socks and the water still isn't running, you're in deeper trouble than I can help you with.
All this survival stuff is well and good if the power goes out in the middle of a nice afternoon in May, but we're seldom so lucky as to get apocalyptic social collapse that coincides with vacation. On Friday, I'll talk about the fifth element of survival. No, it isn't love.
Ooooohhhh, okay, I...wait...





2 comments: