Jacksonville Mississippi has no drinking water

Posted by: MartinFocazio

Jacksonville Mississippi has no drinking water - 08/31/22 02:46 AM

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.
Posted by: Phaedrus

Re: Jacksonville Mississippi has no drinking water - 08/31/22 07:24 AM

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.
Posted by: hikermor

Re: Jacksonville Mississippi has no drinking water - 08/31/22 01:26 PM

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?
Posted by: jshannon

Re: Jacksonville Mississippi has no drinking water - 08/31/22 01:45 PM

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

https://www.jacksonms.gov/boil-water-notices/
Posted by: chaosmagnet

Re: Jacksonville Mississippi has no drinking water - 08/31/22 01:51 PM

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.
Posted by: brandtb

Re: Jacksonville Mississippi has no drinking water - 08/31/22 11:01 PM

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.
Posted by: LesSnyder

Re: Jacksonville Mississippi has no drinking water - 09/01/22 03:16 AM

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
Posted by: brandtb

Re: Jacksonville Mississippi has no drinking water - 09/12/22 03:38 PM

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.