Nobody Wants To Listen

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i've been warning people for a month. nobody wanted to hear it.

A super El Niño is forming right now. And the first thing your family loses isn't the power. It's the water. Here's what I did about it in about four minutes.

Melanie Grace

I've brought this up to my friends for a month now.

They nod. They change the subject. One of them told me I was being dramatic.

So I'm going to lay it out here instead, and you can decide for yourself.

I'm Not A Doomsday Person. I Don't Own Camo.

I'm a mom with three kids and a husband who's gone a lot.

I don't have a bunker. I've never called myself a prepper and I'm not about to start.

But I read what they're actually saying a month ago, and I haven't been able to put it down since.

we haven't had one this strong in about 200 years.

NOAA has an El Niño Advisory up right now.

Not a watch. Not a maybe. It's here.

They're saying there's better than a 90% chance this turns into a very strong event this fall and winter.

The ocean temperature they track hit +2.7°C in mid-August. Anything past +2.0°C is what they call very strong.

Some of the models are running past +3.0°C.

That's off the top of their own chart.

And here's the part I couldn't put down.

The last time one hit this hard was around 200 years ago. It's estimated that somewhere between 50 and 60 million people lost their lives from what came after it. Drought. Crops that didn't come in. No clean water.

You can look up every bit of this yourself.

I'm not pulling your leg, and I'm not trying to scare you.

I'm telling you because of what happened when I turned around and looked at my own house.

the water goes before anything else does.

Everybody plans for the lights. Flashlights, batteries, maybe a generator.

Almost nobody plans for the tap.

But the water in your faucet only got there because a pump pushed it, and pumps run on electricity.

Take the power away, and the whole system between the river and your kitchen slows down.

Then it stops.

And when the pressure drops, dirty groundwater can get pulled in through cracks in the pipe. That's why a boil water notice always shows up right after a big storm.

Asheville lived this after Hurricane Helene. Their boil water notice ran 53 days.

Fifty-three days of not being able to trust your own sink.

You can go about three days without clean water.

Not three weeks. Three days.

That's the whole reason this is the first thing I handled, and not the tenth.

i thought the case in the pantry was plenty. it wasn't close.

I had a case of bottled water in the pantry. I'd always thought of that as being prepared.

Then I did the math one night and felt sick.

One person needs about a gallon a day. And that's not just drinking.

It's cooking. It's washing dishes. It's cleaning up a mess on the floor. It's washing yourself and washing the kids.

There are five of us.

Two weeks means 70 gallons.

That's 22 cases of bottled water stacked on your garage floor.

Nobody has that. And if you ever had to get everybody in the car and go, you're not loading 22 cases.

And The Store Is Not The Plan.

You've seen it happen. The forecast changes on a Tuesday, and by Wednesday afternoon the water aisle is bare.

The people who get water are the ones who already had it.

i tried the other ways first. none of them worked.

I looked at those big 55-gallon barrels.

You need a pump, and a place to put it, and you have to rotate it out. I know myself. I wasn't going to keep up with that.

I looked at just buying more cases. Same problem. Heavy, in the way, and it still runs out.

Boiling? My stove's electric. No power, no stove.

We have a grill, but we've also had the propane run out on a Saturday with burgers on it.

I looked at purification tablets. They do a job, but you wait 30 minutes and you're still drinking whatever mud went in.

Every option had the same flaw.

It runs out, or it needs something else to work first.

my husband is a marine. he told me what to actually look for.

He's been trained to get by on nothing, and he doesn't get worked up about much.

When I brought this up, he didn't tell me I was overreacting.

He told me most of the little filter straws people buy are built for weekend hikers. They're made to get one guy through a Saturday on a trail.

That's a different job than getting a family through two weeks with no tap.

So find one built for the second thing.

That's how I ended up with PureFlow.

here's why there's one in every bag in this house now.

It's about the size of a marker. It weighs almost nothing.

I keep one in my purse and I forget it's in there.

No power. No chemicals. No boiling. Nothing to wait on.

You put one end in the water and drink from the other end, like a straw. That's it. Anyone can do it.

Inside, the water passes through four layers before it reaches your mouth.

First a screen catches the sand and mud and anything you can see. Then a layer of medical-grade PP cotton pulls out the fine sediment. Then a flow layer evens out the pressure, which is what makes it easy to draw on.

My eight-year-old can use it, and so can my mother.

Then the last one does the real work. A 0.01-micron hollow fiber membrane.

That membrane removes 99.99% of bacteria and protozoa. It does not remove viruses or chemicals, and I'm coming back to that in a minute, because it matters.

But bacteria and protozoa are what put people in the hospital after a flood. E. coli. Salmonella. Giardia. Cryptosporidium. It catches microplastics too.

For comparison, other companies filter at 0.2 microns. PureFlow filters 20 times finer than that.

Now here's the part I didn't know about, and it's what actually changed things for me.

It isn't just for sipping.

You screw it onto a regular water bottle. Fill the bottle with creek water or flood water, turn it upside down, and squeeze.

Clean water comes out into whatever you're holding. A pot. A pitcher. A jug on the counter.

So you can fill containers with it, which means you can cook with it, and clean with it, and wash the kids with it.

That's a whole day handled, not just a drink. That's the thing a case of bottles could never do for me.

And one straw handles up to 1,800 gallons.

A gallon a day for all five of us, that's about a year of water out of one little straw.

It has no expiration date when you store it dry. Keep it from freezing, and let it dry out before you put it away. That's the whole maintenance list. Nothing to rotate. No date to check.

It's also made with FDA food-contact-compliant, BPA-free materials.

i want to tell you what it doesn't do, because they told me first.

PureFlow is a filter. It is not a purifier.

It takes out bacteria, protozoa, dirt, sediment, and microplastics.

It does not take out viruses. It does not take out chemicals or heavy metals.

They say that on their own site, in plain words, where anybody can read it.

And here's the thing. None of these straws remove viruses. Most companies just don't bring it up.

Anybody who tells you one little straw does everything is selling you a lie.

I trust PureFlow more because they told me what it doesn't do.

If you want the rest covered, they'll tell you to keep purification tablets on hand for viruses. That's a few dollars and it fits in the same pocket.

For storm water, flood water, a creek, or a tap under a boil notice, this is exactly what a family needs.

i wasn't the only one who figured this out.

They've sold over 56,000+ since they started and have over 4,200 Reviews

I sat and read a bunch of them one night. So many were from moms and grandmothers. People who got caught short one time and swore never again.

It's third-party tested for bacteria and protozoa removal, and pressure-tested for membrane integrity and leak resistance.

There's also a 30-day money-back guarantee on it.

So I Didn't Buy One.

One straw in the kitchen drawer does nothing for you if you're not in the kitchen.

There's more than one for every person under this roof. One in my purse, one in my husband's truck, one in each of the kids' backpacks, one in the hall closet with the flashlights.

Then I got a few more and gave them to my mom, my sister, and my neighbor across the street.

Nobody asked me why. They already knew why.

I skipped one hair appointment and covered my entire family.

i'd rather have it and not need it.

I'll tell you what actually changed, and it isn't what you'd think.

I stopped lying awake, running through it.

It's not that I think the sky is falling. It's that this one thing is off my list for good, and it took me about four minutes.

That's not prepping.

That's just being a mom who thought ahead.

And if this winter turns out to be nothing at all, I'll be the happiest person you know. I'd rather have it and not need it.

they're running a sale, and these clear out when the weather turns.

I checked this morning, and there's a sale going.

I'll tell you what I've watched happen every single time.

The shelves clear the day a storm hits the forecast.

Not the day it lands. The day it shows up on the news.

Don't be the one shopping that afternoon.

Don't say nobody told you.

If you want to get the PureFlow Emergency Water Filter Straw for you and your family, click the button below to go to the PureFlow website.

If I remember correctly, they're having a special sale right now where you can get PureFlow for up to 67% off.

Do yourself a favor and get one for everybody you'd worry about. Your kids. Your parents. The people who won't do it themselves.

I promise you'll be glad you did.

Get PureFlow For Up To 67% OFF Now!

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PS. My youngest keeps hers clipped to her backpack and calls it her "creek straw." She thinks it's a fun thing to have, and I hope that's all it ever is. But I've been telling people about this for a month, and I'd rather be the one who sounded dramatic than the one who didn't say anything.

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