Originally Posted By: CANOEDOGS
except for the water which i could get from a spring,a big one..or a local lake i could walk to in a few minutes

Unfortunately those kinds of water supply aren't necessarily reliable. During Hurricane Ike the Seabrook sewage treatment plant was submerged and spilled who-knows-how-much of who-knows-what. No surface water supply anywhere nearby was trustworthy for a while. Not to mention the chemical plants in Pasadena and Baytown.

Quote:

..however..this all smacks of 1950's cold war hid in the basement thinking.unless you live in a earthquake or storm zone

A large percentage of the US population lives in one or the other: all of California and all of Florida alone is a lot of people...

Quote:
no one needs a two week supply of anything.fear mongering is a good way to sell stuff and i'm old enough to have see several waves of this sort of thing pass thru several times since the 1950's.

No, *everyone* needs a two week supply of water. *Always*. It's just a matter of where it comes from normally, where it comes from in abnormal situations, etc.

It's mainly a matter of contingency planning and personal choice. Some people don't refill their car's gas tank until the 20-miles-to-go light come on - I doubt any of these people have any drinking water, extra blankets, etc. Some people top off their gas tank at about the halfway mark - these people probably buy their next roll of toilet paper *before* running out, etc.

PLBs, fancy survival tents & bivvy sacks etc may not get to the cost/benefit threshold for most people, but the things on that list seem cheap & reasonable to me. (not sufficient! just no extravagance). Water especially meets the cost/benefit threshold pretty easily...