PLANNING FOR WATER IN A CRISIS

 Water...

We literally can't live without it and yet many of us don't realize how quickly it can become something you can't find anywhere.  We found this out during the recent epic freeze event.  This is some of what we saw:

You were limited to how many you could get...

The racks were empty...even the ice was gone...

And the shelves at all the stores were empty.  Notice the sign above; they were limiting water to two packages per customer...then it was changed to one...and then there was none...

The city (and most around Houston) shut down the water, we were under a boil water notice.  People drove out of town to try to find water but the power failure was so widespread, everyone was the same. 

We were fairly well prepared but honestly, there was more we could have done and will do for the next time.

One thing we've found when prepping for a storm is that people always forget about flavored sparkling waters.  We happen to love them.  No sweeteners, no sugar, just carbonated water with random fruit flavors.  It's water.  Sure you can't cook with it or wash with it but it fulfills the body's need for water.  I picked up these two cases of La Croix when everyone else was looking for plain water; they had plenty and for some reason, the store didn't limit these.  On the plus side, we got to try two new flavors; key lime and hibiscus.

We have a cabinet in our dining room that has the Keurig machine on top.  We call it our drink center.  There are two drawers at the top, one is for 2nd Man's coffee and the other is for my tea.

Then there are two cabinets in the lower section:

On the left side, we regularly try to keep four 1 gallon containers of water for the Keurig machine (we use distilled for that)...and then on the shelf above that, some soft drinks for 2nd Man and some various boxes of tea bags for both of us.

And this is the cabinet on the right side.  We keep it stocked with those sparking waters on the top shelf (easily holds a couple dozen) and then we fill the bottom shelf with plain bottled water (also about two dozen).  We don't use the bottled water that often, it's there more for backup (situations like we just had) or to grab a bottle if we're walking to the park or taking a long drive somewhere.

For most of our drinking and kitchen usage...

...we use this.  This is one of those 5 gallon water dispensers.  We had this one at the farm for a few years.  It wasn't used as often out there as it could be here and so a couple of months ago, I brought it back into town (fortuitous, ha).  This one is what they call a bottom loading dispenser.  No more lifting big bottles up and flipping them upside down while pouring water all over the floor, ha.  You open the bottom door, there is a pump device that goes into the bottle and then you slide it into the machine and close the door.  It pulls water up into the reservoirs.  No heavy lifting (except getting it TO your machine but we use a dolly for that).  We love it for instant cold water to drink and instant hot water for cooking, tea, instant soups etc.  It has room temp as well.  As fate would have it, before our recent water outage, I had refilled our spare 5 gallon container and we had just put a new one inside the machine.  That gave us plenty of water for the duration.

This most recent boil water event however has made us make some changes...we are going to keep a third filled 5 gallon bottle in the closet at all times.  Just in case.  And since I pay close attention to the weather and news, the first hint of a storm that might come this way, I'll make sure our supply is topped off.

But without power, the dispenser above won't work.  We'd still have the water bottle that's inside of it, but how would we pump it out?  We just bought one of these cool items to keep in our emergency kit:

It's this awesome 5 Gallon Water Pump (affiliate link to Amazon).  It charges up via USB like a cell phone and when you need it, it just sits on top of a 5 gallon bottle with a hose into the water, you touch the button on top and it dispenses water!  We tried it out and it worked great.  It worked so great, I even bought a couple for two of my dear coworkers who were out of water and power for days as well.

For toilet flushing, we can still go down to the pool and scoop up water like we did this last time so a new bucket with a sturdy handle for carrying water and a snap on lid is all we need to have in order to upgrade our backup supplies.

Of course, for now, this applies to us here in town at the apartment.  The farm has well water so there shouldn't be too many situations where we would run out or even have a boil water notice but that doesn't mean we won't plan for needing water when we are out there and have our own well.  2nd Family has a manual pump for the well if there is an extended power outage.  When we have our own well dug, we'll make sure we have a manual pump too. 

It's not just hurricane season that we have to worry about, now it's year round.

Anyone have any other water prepping suggestions?