You know I created this sub forum many years ago, thinking it was a great place to discuss hypothetical situations such as an entire capital city having no drinking water. Of course back then the whole thing was hypothetical, I didn’t think realistically that it could happen outside of a local scale.

I would say that this ranks higher than even a wide scale power black out in terms of SHTF levels of bad.

It’s really hard to overstate how much you need water for just routine living. We’ve always maintained a supply of drinking water and utility water, sufficient for about three days, longer if we use only “outdoor plumbing” so to speak.

I’m not really sure how I would maintain a reasonable supply of water if I didn’t have the benefit of storage space. I guess the message here is no matter where you live try to maintain a good source of your own water to drink.

Yeah, when I first saw the story I thought I read it wrong! Amazing that such a large scale water problem could happen in the US but I expect this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Water is bulky but at least having water for drinking is doable. I've got a good number of the 5 gallon blue Aquatainers, probably time to pick up a few more.

I've got potable water stashed all over, mostly because, living in EQ country, I c.an foresee the widescale disruption of water mains. As a former AZ desert rat, I know the fundamental importance of water.

Jackson, MSS, has been under a boil water order for some time. Boiling is the most effective way of disinfecting water, although it won't necessarily remove all forms of chemicals.

So, what's the problem?

In Jackson, flooding took out a treatment plant..is what I heard last night.

https://www.jacksonms.gov/boil-water-notices/

Where we live, the water utility has about three days of treated water on hand and up high for gravity-fed water pressure. My thinking has been that around day two of a water utility outage is our red line for leaving the area. We do have at least three days of water stored on hand.

Every time I go to the supermarket (which is about every two weeks, because my wife is the main shopper) I pick up a gallon of water in the clear plastic (not the milk jug kind). They're the advertised brands like Poland Spring or Deer Park. They're about $1.50 - $2.00. At this point we probably have 50 of them. They are stored on shelves around the house. Cheap insurance and I don't have to carry in ten at a time when everybody else is trying to get them.

I'm just over 65 years on the central Gulf coast of Florida, and have lost city water only once (back in the 60s) due to hurricanes... quite a bit of power outage over the years, but the city water has been pretty stable... that being said, I store about 20gal in a couple of 20L Scepter cans and a couple of older AquaTainers (2ml of bleach added for storage, and rotated out at the beginning of hurricane watch) additionally I have an older model Sawyer .1 micron 5 gal bucket filter... I purchased some low scale (single digit ppm) chlorine test strips, and titrated out some of the new formula pool shock per 5 gal bucket just in case

One place many people forget about is their water heater. It has a supply of drinkable water in an emergency. One thing, though, when you open the drain tap in the bottom, the first 5 - 10 seconds of flow will look like crap because of the sediment and gunk from the sacrificial anode. I drain mind once a month and it's nasty. I don't want to think about what it would look like if I never drained it.