I worked for a water treatment facility. We were required to be able to run the whole thing using generators which were tested and run on a regular schedule. There are generators at all remote pumps as well.
We were never days away from not delivering water.
Sure, if there is total societal collapse, then the water would stop eventually.
This is me in the Seattle area. We really ought to be prepared to live “off the grid” for a month or so in case of things like earthquake, etc. This virus reminded me to get moving on those plans.
So we did stock up on 25-year shelf-life emergency rations and made sure we had ample non-perishable items that we’ll rotate through normal use.
And I did stock up on stored water, except in my case it was ordering some long term storage jugs from REI and filling them with tap water. I guess I’d be one of those bottled water buyers if I didn’t like tap water.
I lived in a rural rental house with a well. Water was safe to drink according to the tests but undrinkable to me due to the taste/smell.
Now if my family drank 8 bottles a day at home and went to Sam’s Club once a month I would need 240 bottles. I would be picking up 10 or more cases in 1 visit. It would look like I was stocking up but it would be my normal usage.
I too live in a rural area. The local power is largely supplied by wind generators, and my water is provided by my own well. So…it seems possible my well would continue working just so long as the wind generators are turned on / not broken.
The well water tastes pretty bad, so I double-filter it: Filter one is on the faucet, and removes the metals, pesticides and some of the mineral hardness. Filter 2 is in the pitcher, it removes everything else, including hard minerals. Letting the water stand a few minutes in the pitcher removes the gassy smell. After double-filtration, the water is actually pretty good. I would switch to a reverse osmosis system for drinking water if I could pony up the cash.
So…I’d stock up on filters, not bottled water.
I live in a rural house with a well. The tests said the water has way too much iron, so don’t drink it and don’t cook with it. So I buy a lot of gallons of water normally for me to drink/cook with and to top off the fish tank with anyway.
I was just in the supermarket, the water and toilet paper shelves were fully stocked. And yet we still get images of empty shelves and panic buying.
Here in Northern Virginia I have been slowly picking up canned food which inya pinch can be eaten cold and bottles water. My roommate works at a grocery store so we should be good on tp (lol)
I also have a Brita pitcher that I use for drinking water.
Hmm for some reason I read this originally as it was harder to smuggle in bottles of water if you were a guy VS a woman who could put them in her purse.
Now that I reread it I don’t understand the statement.
Mine was palatable to cook with and shower. Drinking it straight out of the tap I couldn’t do.
A man just has to put the bottle of water in the crotch of his jeans and tell everyone he’s the reincarnation of Johnny Holmes. 
Yeah, I think it’s a local problem. I don’t see any signs of it around here; things looked entirely normal at the stores (though I didn’t check the face mask supply.)
Something similar on CNN. This is about toilet paper, but some of the same reasons are along the same lines.
What an utter waste; of your money & of resources.
Have you considered getting water delivery service; yanno, those 5 gal jugs you see in many offices, or at least switching to purchasing gallons & refilling the little bottles?
A lot of those images are from Australia; haven’t heard about them so much in the US.
Or just getting a Brita pitcher or equivalent. When I lived at a place with a well that’s what I did - I ran the water through that sort of filter for cooking and drinking. MUCH cheaper. Just replace the filters as needed. Instead of cases and cases of water I just picked up a small box of filters once or twice a year.
I saw a photo from a local Target store where all of their soup shelves were empty.
Every single story I’ve read or saw about empty shelves is always at a CostCo, every single time.
People with CostCo memberships treat them like it’s the only place they buy stuff, my friend only gets his gas at CostCo despite having to drive 15 minutes out of his way to get it and waiting in a 20 minute line only to save 10 cents a gallon. Said he waited 40 minutes in line last week at CostCo to get his bottled water, when he could have very easily gone to a Food 4 Less just next door and just walked in and out with bottled water that was plentiful like I did.
Update:
Wegmans in Ithaca, NY, though well supplied with most stuff, was nearly out of toilet paper (and, slightly more logically, also quite low on kleenex/facial tissue.)
I commented on this to a store worker and he said it had been like that since about 2 in the afternoon, when some people from Syracuse had descended on the store and nearly bought them out. (No, I don’t know how he knew they were from Syracuse. Maybe they said something about it.)
The people from Syracuse didn’t seem to have found either the food coop or the Tops in nearby Watkins Glen; both of which seemed to be normally stocked in toilet paper as in other goods.
I’m told that in some places “jugs” is a slang term for “hooters.”
We lived in Jewett City here in Connecticut for about 4 months, and there was enough iron in the water that if you set a pitcher of it in the sunlight, it would rust [well, go that muddy reddish brown color of rust] over the course of a day. We got a Britta, and as a hoot we backwashed the filter into a pieplate and found what were effectively iron bits when we looked at it under a microscope. We could pick them up with a magnet - very freaky. It was like someone had dumped that stuff that is in those draw on a cartoon with a magnet toy into our water.
But the britta made it palatable and not rust, I am very fond of filtering the water at our town house, it is town water rahter than well water and otherwise distinct chlorine and whatever smell that comes from however old the town water system pipes and tanks are.
Our local water is delicious, but we’ve run it through a Berkey filter for years since I was in chemo.
We were in a Walmart here in Honolulu the other night, and soup and chili were cleaned out.