I hope that this is the right place to post this. I found a lot of great articles related to water purification and storage, but nothing recent. Although most everyone on this forum is already quite prepared from what I have seen, it is easy to get complacent.
I would like to share with you something that happened at my house yesterday. For context, we live in a suburban neighborhood in Central Georgia. We have city-supplied natural gas and water, and Flint Electric supplies our electricity, if we pay all the "subscriptions" on time.
Yesterday morning, the water unexpectedly stopped running in our neighborhood. It was only out for about an hour and a half. This is the second time that this has happened this year, but this is not something that happens often. It had been years since this last happened. We found out that the water was off when a neighbor called my wife in a panic, asking her if our water was out too. Eventually, she talked to three neighbors who were all surprised, concerned, and annoyed about the unexpected outage, mostly due to the lack of an official prior notice. I guess that makes sense because governments are supposed to notify their residents before they do things, right?
At our house, this situation was only a minor inconvenience. Our neighbors' reactions were viewed as sad but amusing. Most were concerned because they had very little, if any, water in their house. Some just had a few bottles of water from the store at home.
At our house, we keep a modest amount of water in the attached garage, stored in many containers in sizes from 5 to .5 gallons. Some containers have spigots for ease of use at a sink, for example. Some we use for camping, and other small containers are kept because they are easier to carry if we need to move a little water from one place to another. This would come in handy if we needed to pour water into the tank to manually flush the toilet during an outage. Since a hurricane that passed over us one August many years ago that left us without electricity or water for 4 days, we also store six 40-bottle cases of 1/2 liter water bottles (just over 5 gal. per case). These are convenient to use or share during emergencies, on road trips, or at outdoor events, etc.
My point is that if you do not already have a realistic amount of water stored and available before an unexpected outage, it is too late once you discover the water is off, regardless of the reason. It does not matter if you get your water from a well or the city/county system. Do the math and figure out how much water you feel you need to store for your family for however long you may need it to last. Use it and/or rotate it twice a year to keep it fresh.
I thought I would share this to help emphasize that being prepared is important. Having empty containers will not do you any good. You have to have them full of water.
