The article is sort of scattershot and unfocused, and the people they interviewed didn't seem to have thought about bugging in: "''There’s no reason why there wouldn’t be [utilities],' Bosma speculates." - and Bosma is Public Information Officer for Vermont's Emergency Management office. Shudder. The reporter couldn't reach anybody at a local food store authorized to comment on plans for pandemics, but a customer service rep was willing to gossip. The reporter interviewed a naturopathic doctor: "I use food as medicine."

Part of the lack of solid information is the nature of alternative weeklies (the search tags the paper assigned to the article are "food, health, quirky, religion"), part is lack of knowledge on the part of the reporter, and part is the reporter's failure to work with his interviewees to get some solid information. I don't think the reporter took it seriously, and that seems to be reflected in the responses.

Bugging in is taken seriously in the San Francisco Bay Area - we have refineries that occasionally spew acids and poisons in the air when things go wrong, and people are told to "shelter in place," and we all expect to be stranded after the big earthquake.

The Vermont "Stock Up and Stay Home" planner at
http://healthvermont.gov/panflu/documents/TTL-StockUpPlanner.pdf
(downloads a .pdf file) suggests for a family of four for two weeks that we start with 5 lbs of white flour, 5 lbs of wheat flour, 5 lbs of white rice, 4.4 lbs (?) of corn flour, 5 lbs of corn meal, and 5 lbs of pasta. What th' heck are they thinking of cooking? The entire list is over a page long and includes canned meat and fish, soy sauce, tabasco, dried beans, nuts and seeds, and other stuff. But I'd love to see whoever made that list live off it for two weeks after having the supplies sit in the attic or basement for a year.

It's good to suggest planning on bugging in, but I'm sorry it wasn't taken more seriously by the reporter. C'est la vie.