I recently responded with this message to a thread on fishing and looting stores. I suspect it would be well to make this point again for others benefit.

During the recent midwest ice storms whole sections of the country were without electricity. My wife and I were without both electricity and water (well pump.....) for 8 full days, some are still out. From that experience the point I want to make is this;

Don't even think of counting on stores for anything at all when an emergency strikes. First off, when power fails, Wal-Mart (and all other stores) close up. Second, when they do open, absolutely anything and everything that you might need will disappear with an hour. If looting is going on, it will disappear within minutes.
The things you think of for survival kits are not what you will need first. 5 gallon Water Containers. Who would have thought? 5 gallon gasoline containers, food, animal feed, firewood, propane in small containers. Water. When everyone is out of water, where do you get it? Not just for drinking, In the long run you need to flush your toilets and water your critters. Bottled water at the store was sold out immediately. Those Culligan machines in the front of Wal-Mart stores broke down under the heavy draw (filters clogged up?). Not to mention 2 hour waits for them.
This was not a terrible disaster, Not really even long term survival. I was lucky, living on a small farm I had a pond, woodstove, and friends.

I had all the standard things in my kit. They were not what I needed when time came.

Jon Davis

Those are the reasons that FEMA officials (quitely) began talking about the need for people to be prepared to be on their own for up to 2 weeks after a disaster (2004 Florida hurricanes), instead of the 3 days bandied about in the press.

Glad you came through Ok.

Rotate your stock,

JimJr

All great points, and I don't know for sure how one goes about storing just water for an extended period of time. Our home shares a water well with another place, lose power for any length of time and we are both SOL. We are in the hospital grid, so we get power faster than most, but in the event of something BIG that might not matter.

We always keep a lot of water on hand...I have four five gal water containers, and my wife drinks a lot of storebought juice (the stuff in the large plastic bottles), we wash those out and fill them with water. I leave a little bit of bleach in each bottle, and date them for rotation. We have no critters to worry about, but still, even with our 40 gal water heater full of water, for a total of maybe 100 gals, we can not last indefinately. We do have a hot tub, we can use the water in it for flushing, etc, so that will really help us stretch it out. I guess we could buy some of those blue 55gal water barrels, we have the space to store them, but what about apartment dwellers?

And for sure "looting" won't work unless you are at the head of the looters line...

A whole bunch of 5 gal food grade buckets lined up in your basement or garage...I figure ( roughly) one for each day without city water.

tro

I have 2 of these filled with water in my garage:



I rotate the supply every 6 months and add bleach to keep them drinkable. Due to unforeseen circumstances, I was unable to rotate the water once for over a year. When I did change the water, the old stuff still seemed fresh and clean. I drank a cupfull and didn't suffer any negative consequences.

www.aquaflex.net and www.nitro-pak.com have quite a variety of storage containers for long term water storage. I have been told that some plastics are not that good for water storage because they can begin to degrade, adding chemicals to the water. I don't have any expertise on this though.

I have one advantage living in NYC. I have a sailboat and if the problem is really long term, can sail up the Hudson, though I would have to sail quite a way before it changed from salt to fresh. (That is, assuming I can get to the boat before the looters do.).

Yeah - you'd have to sail NORTH of Albany

Better bet would probably be to get up into the Catskill area, and head into the mountains - Names like Croton, Neversink, Roundout, Pepacton, Ashokan, Schoharie, and Cannonsville should ring LOUD bells - to the tune of 547.5 BILLION gallons of drinkable fresh water

Keeping extra water on hand is a good idea esp. in So. Cal. where almost ALL our water is brought in over the San Andraus fault. We're one quake away from a major disruption in water supplies. I keep 5 barrels of water on hand in addition to supplies of bottled water which we continually rotate.
I also plan to connect the barrels to the rain gutters to replenish should it become necessary.

Good point. Sailing north of Albany in my little weekender would require quite a bit of fresh water on the boat just to get there.

Time to revise Plan B, and buy some more maps.

I suppose it's difficult to anticipate such things as earthquakes and nuclear war but in our case we had warning in the form of weather forcasts. Having Empty containers we would have been able to fill on the spur of the moment, water, gasoline, food, etc. Next time I will take these forcasts a little more seriously. Live and, hopefully, learn.
even apartment dwellers have a tub that can be filled on the spur of the moment.
Jon