Batteries I can understand, but water? They had plenty of time to fill up every container available, and those in houses had 30-50 gallons of water in their water heaters.
"Batteries I can understand, but water? They had plenty of time to fill up every container available, and those in houses had 30-50 gallons of water in their water heaters."
Most water heaters are on the first floor, and unless you cut off the water into the tank, they tend to get contaminated if something happens to the supply pressure, particularly ruptures in the ground, where the line acts like a siphon hose. Also, a lot of the people in NOLA live in an appartment, and many appartments have a boiler system that distributes hot water to the apartments, so they don't have the tank in their quarters. Another gotcha is that many of the older houses have much smaller tanks, and some have demand heaters with no tank at all.
Besides, ain't the gubmint supposed to take care of them? Some people have never thought that the Government, when and if it is even competent, is going to be awful darned busy in a disaster of this magnitude, natural or otherwise.