There's two systems that I know of that are good for rotating water. The system that I use is to replace my emergency water in 1 gal PET containers every 6 months. There's only about $1/each so it's not a major expense. I keep them with the emergency supplies so they don't get used for anything else. The old ones get used for drinking water and will last a couple of weeks. The other system one of my coworkers uses. He buys 24 ct cases of bottled water (about 3 gallons/case) and continually rotates then as he uses them. It's more expensive, but his supplies are probably fresher then mine.

This is the video I guess. Filmed 3 miles off the shore: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnew...oast-Guard.html

That's quite formidable sight. They were lucky to be that far off the shore.

The World Health Organization (WHO) puts out daily situation reports from major disasters and incidents, the ones from Japan have been informative and have some good data in them - http://www.wpro.who.int/sites/eha/disasters/2011/jpn_earthquake/list.htm. If you read the initial reports you can see the early assessments (including areas where they had no data or knowledge of the situation on the ground), and if you read them every day you get a sense of where there's progress, and where progress may be stymied. Everyone is working very hard under unreal circumstances.

I ran across this article about evacuees who are lacking food. These people in the article are hanging on with just starvation rations, it seems (i.e. one small bowl of rice a day).

Despite the opinion expressed by many of us (myself included) that Japanese would not resort to looting or foraging, sounds like the situation how become desperate enough to force people to start foraging. Sounds like the more remote towns and villages have not even been reached at all yet.

"There’s no food, tell people there is no food"
This was originally published on 18 March and updated on 19 March.

I keep at least ten cases of Costco bottled water on hand; most of the time there are between 12-14 cases. We go through at least two each month, and I rotate them. Each case is a bit over 4.6 gallons.

Under my workbench there are three five-gallon water bladders, which I dump out and refill twice a year. While I'm prepared to purify this water if need be, it always comes out smelling and tasting like good water when I dump it out.

My water heater holds 50 gallons, but that only works if the water is shut off before contaminants are introduced into the supply.

At a round 120 gallons, the five of us have 24 days of water at 1 gallon/person/day. If we can't trust the water heater, we're at 14 days. I'm always leery of trusting the 1/gallon/person/day figure though, because if it's hot or we're exerting ourselves we could easily drink more than that before any water was used for cooking or washing.

I have carefully prepared a small container of pool chlorine with instructions on how to create a chlorine solution and purify water with it. While writing this post I went into my emergency supplies to estimate how much water I could purify with it, and to my dismay I can't lay hands on it.

While I would have discovered its lack during my Spring emergency gear checkup in a week or so, I'm not happy to learn that I've misplaced it.

Some year ago I did archaeology at Canyon de Chelly and we regularly visited an extremely isolated site (Navajo Fortress) that required some fairly serious climbing to access. We needed to carry all our water which typically involved an overnight stay.

On one occasion we stashed an extra gallon of water, returning a year later. Naturally we brought a full ration of water on our return, not knowing the condition of the stash we had left behind. It was ordinary tap water, not treated in any way. As it turned out, it was perfectly fine. The only precaution we took was to store it away from direct sunlight, but it was exposed to both high (90-100F) and subfreezing (circa 0F) temps during the intervening year.

I don't bother with commercially bottled water, except in a few rare situations. There are a fair number of studies that show tap water to be just as good, or even better.

The tap water in my town is excellent.

I started with a little bottled water in order to keep some easily consumed, stored and rotated water in each vehicle. It's also handy, I've discovered, to have several containers instead of just one, if you want to give some away.

Next, my wife and kids actually started drinking the stuff. I realized that before I started storing water in our cars they were largely becoming dehydrated while we were traveling. So I kept a stock to keep replenishing the cars.

After that, I realized that my water storage at home was inadequate. So I bought more; my ten case minimum stock cost me less than $50 to put together and costs me nothing to maintain other than some garage space and the chore of putting the new cases at the bottom of the stacks.

I'd rather get some food-quality 50-gallon drums and have a spot to put them in, but I'll need to move to a bigger house for that to happen.

Official death toll approaching 9,000. Current projections are 18,000 total dead.

Gasoline is still scarce, which is hampering the delivery of supplies into the affected areas.

My friend is still mulling her return to Tokyo. There is still so much confusion about the current status of the nuclear situation. The attitude seems to be "no news is good news" so maybe the less they say about the reactors, the better people will feel.

Chances are good that there will be more major aftershocks to come. I just hope that one big enough to tip Fukushima Daiichi back into instability does not come before they can bring things fully under control.

The latest wrinkle in the nuclear saga is this CNN report that the Pentagon is "considering" mandatory evacuations of not only military families, but also service members, from the Tokyo area. It's not clear if these are just contingency plans, or whether they are, as CNN is implying, closer to reality than just contingency planning.

The State Department has also sent dependents out of Japan even from as far as the Nagoya consulate, and the military has been carrying out the voluntary evacaution of military dependents. All US warships have steamed out of Yokosuka, including the aircraft carrier USS George Washington even though it is not fully operational and not even fully manned.

It's hard to reconcile the reassurances of the Japanese government with the actions taken by the US government. I suppose it could be out of an abundance of caution but these are the kinds of actions that really put strain on diplomatic relations, so I'm sure that they are not being done lightly. Makes you wonder what the US government knows that we don't know about.

I forget if I posted this, but the Swedish embassy already told its nationals on the 16th to start taking KI within 250km of Fukushima Daiichi, including those in Tokyo. Granted, there aren't that many Swedes in Japan, but it's part of the pattern.

My friend who evacuated from Japan is having a heck of a time making heads or tails of the news and trying to decide whether or when it is safe to return.

Today's flight of military families into SeaTac near Seattle consisted of 250 persons, 190 of them children. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2014564129_japanevacuees22m.html I suspect that pattern will hold should the flights continue; its like the popular reaction of Londoners during the Blitz in WWII, get the children out of harm's way. This opportunity for repatriation of military families is voluntary, but apparently parents want their kids away from potential radiation.

I doubt it would go to a mandatory evacuation for families let alone military personnel, but there might be enough problems or costs with resupply that units could make a tactical retreat from Japan to other bases until stable supply lines are restored. Really though, I don't speak for the Pentagon, I'm talking out of another orifice...