Carrying a number of small water bottles often takes up more room than taking the same amount of water in gallon jugs to an incident. It can also be time consuming to keep a water cooler clean and stocked with fresh water. Our department has worked out a solution to these two problems by taking an empty cooler and a few sealed 5 gallon water jugs on calls.
We have found that 5 gallons of water will last two to four hours depending on the weather and operating conditions. On our TSU, we carry two 5-gallon coolers and two to four 5-gallon water bottles.