Can You Tell If Water Is Safe To Drink Just By Looking At It?

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How do you know if water is safe to drink? This is a question I hear often. So can we tell if water is safe to drink just by looking at it? Clean water is a key concern for those who wish to get out into the backcountry, to hike in the great outdoors and travel off the beaten track. Water weighs 1kg per litre, so we can't carry enough water with us if we are out for a number of days as it becomes just too heavy.

Therefore, we need to be able to procure water and know it's safe to drink. There are many different pathogenic organisms which can make you unwell - from an upset stomach to very serious illnesses.

So, how do we make sure our water is safe to drink? If the water looks clean, can we assume it is safe to drink? Is it safer to drink than water that looks cloudy? Watch this video for more information on what you need to worry about and what you need to know to make your water safe.

This video forms part of a series of 20 FREE videos I've made to help people with wilderness bushcraft, survival skills and general outdoor life.

To get the other free videos right now, please visit

http://paulkirtley.co.uk/free-tips-and-advice/

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Video Transcription

hi there I'm Paul Kirtley founder of frontier bushcraft and author of Paul Kurt Lee's blog the leading source of wilderness bushcraft advice and information on the net now I get a lot of people asking me about water purification and it's a big concern for people who want to go into the backcountry who want to go camping for a number of days they obviously can't carry all of their water with them and therefore they're going to need to get some they're going to need to procure some water along the way because water weighs a kilo per litre and therefore it's just way too heavy to carry as much as you need for any length of time I know that the water that I'm taking with me and my water bottles is safe to drink but when I'm out in the wild how do I make sure how do I know that the water I'm going to be collecting is safe to drink in particular how do I know if water in a stream like this is safe to drink it looks pretty clear I can see the bottom it's not cloudy it is flowing it's not a very big stream but it is trickling through so can I assume it's safe to drink well the answer is simply no you can't tell by looking whether or not the water is safe to drink or not there can be hundreds of thousands if not millions of pathogenic organisms in a milliliter of water and those pathogenic organisms are microscopic and therefore by definition you need a microscope to look at them so you can't tell with your naked eye however clothes you look however close you get to that water however clean it looks you can't tell whether or not it's safe to drink the disease-carrying organisms which can be can be present in water are so small however clothes you look at the water with your naked eye you are not going to see them you're not going to detect them and don't just because the locals are drinking the water don't think that the water's safe to drink either and they may have an acquired immunity to some of the diseases which are in there and at best are going to cause you to have what's often known as travelers diarrhea basically it's going to upset your stomach for days and it's going to make a real misery of your journey so you should always treat water as suspect particularly when you're traveling in areas

you're not familiar with so the message there is always treat the water with suspicion even if it looks crystal clear if you don't know it's safe to drink then treat it as unsafe to drink and use one of the recognized methods of purifying your water to make it safe to drink while you're traveling and I cover in other videos and elsewhere on my blog in articles and videos how to make sure that you make your water safe either by boiling by chemical sterilization or filtration look at all the different methods of pros and cons and where they work and where they don't work in other videos and other articles so if you like this video please go over to my blog and my site is Paul curtly co uk that's Paul curtly Cote UK and there you'll get 20 free videos like this full of free tips and advice bushcraft survival and things to enhance your outdoor life over at Paul curtly Cote UK and if you like this video please share it with your friends as well thanks for watching and I'll see you on the next video