"If that happened here in DC, there'd be a stampede of minivans and SUVs zooming (or crawling in gridlock) to Costco, Wal-Mart, Sams and every supermarket, mini-mart and corner grocery within 100 miles of the Beltway, at least."

You just identified a major problem in modern Amercican life. The omni-present SUV. Hadn't stopped to consider that before. Suppose one panicked mother - or father - drives up to a supermarket in an SUV. Just how many cases of bottled water, and how many cans of soup, do you think they can load into one vehicle? I bet it's a lot. This type of hoarding is going to be a BIG problem in a real disaster.

"Note the contemporaneous report below that there was hand-to-hand combat in a Los Angeles grocery over the last can of pork and beans. This excerpt is from the cover article of the November 2, 1962 edition of Time."

Ha! Ha!! A black eye over pork-and-beans. That's pretty pathetic. And there wan't even a nuclear incident in 1962. This is doing a lot to encourage me to stock up my food supplies now.

Pete #2