Bushcraft or BS: Filtering Water with a String

There’s no end to the harebrained ideas for purifying water in survival situations.

The video above is a test of one of the most egregious offenders of “survival hacks” gone wrong. This is the kind of tip that comes from non-experts who need “fluff” content to fill their new book.

As you can see in the video this survival hack has 2 main problems:

1. Speed: you’d die of thirst waiting for this technique to work.
2. Sanitation: String or paper towel will remove large contaminants like dirt and may lower turbidity (cloudiness) but will do very little to remove the pathogens (bacteria, fungus, protozoa, viruses) or chemical contaminants from the water. It’ll still need to be filtered or boiled to be safe to drink.

This survival tip is complete bullshit. This is a water pre-filtering technique at best, and a very bad one. You’d be better off pouring the water through a ball cap or bandana to remove large contaminants.

Best to leave this technique to middle school science lesson on capillary action.
Read More