On Monday, when we had a high of -18, and windchills in the -50’s, I was driving home from work at night and saw that work crews had dug holes in the roads big enough to lose a car in, and they were out there with spotlights freezing their tails off trying to repair something. When I got home I asked dad, who works in the same building as the department that coordinates those crews, and as I suspected they were fixing a broken water main. In fact, he said that water mains were breaking all over town. I asked him if there was water set aside in case our water main broke.
His answer: “No, why would we do that?”
I would have facepalmed if not for the fact that I had both hands under the cat trying to thaw them out. After much convincing, we finally got about 5 gallons of drinking water set aside. It turned out we didn’t need it, but I certainly felt better having it.
This is the same guy who thinks canned food spoils after a month, and that there is never any reason to have more than 2 boxed of dried pasta in the house. God help us if anything serious happens before my house is built!
(Sorry for the rant, I just needed to vent a bit.)
Hopefully this will be a wake up call for some folks. It’s not difficult to store water and a very good filter can be made for about $50.
Part of my disaster plan is storing 200-300 gallons of water in the garage. I have a spigot set up in there for easily filling up a plastic barrel that I fill before weather events.
Luckily where I’m at water inavailability is a really low likelihood. Power is the major issue. But I do keep 2-3 gallons of drinking water in the pantry.