If you are like most people, including myself then you have municipal supplied water at your house. And when that is the case, the quality and frankly safety of the water is completely dependent on another entity the water provider. Now, that is normally not a problem but consider when there is one, you are potentially days away from the beginning of the problem.

It potentially seems wrong but I have seen more problems with water than any other utility outage. Last year, there was about a four month boil order in place for the state capital residents. That is over several hundred thousand residents affected by water quality.

When that incident first occurred, there was a reverse 911 call put into effect. This was in the mid-afternoon and by the next day, water was sold out throughout the entire area. We were not effected because our town has a different source of water, nevertheless the water was gone in all the towns in our area.

This was the beginning of a chronic culture of panic behavior. It was the same with toilet paper or hand sanitizer. People are not prepared to deal with any sort of outage or service disruption. Inventory in stores are not deep enough to service the needs of the entire population.

This is why I store water. Just plain tap water put into seven gallon jugs. I dump the water about once a year to inspect the containers and just refresh the supply. This usually happens in conjunction with our annual hunting trip, because we use the jugs to bring water to camp for the trip.

A minimum recommendation is to store one gallon per person, per day. That is for drinking, cooking and sanitation. I’ve got enough water to last about a week at that rate.

When I was in college, we had a localized flood turned landslide that wiped out a bunch of infrastructure including water delivery. In that case, the water was out for around a week. National guard had setup portable toilets and water distribution within two days of the event and showers came about three days later. While I am not saying any event will follow the others, there are two examples of what can happen.

Water can be saved in any clean container. Opaque is better than clear because it restricts light causing growth of biological life. You can put up some amount of water almost free. Even if you are paying for it at a store, it should be less than $2/gallon. The mark of someone that is prepared is that they are taking advantage of this time of plenty to accommodate if there is scarcity.