[Uncle Ike]

” The other option is to have a couple of barrels of water stored in the basement. “

Good for short-term bare-survival - and, with a little bit of preparation, you can devise some kind of rainwater catchment and filtering system to replenish...

However, if you’re thinking long term, ya gotta be thinking in terms of agriculture and that means irrigation - and that means a substantial natural supply of water, and the means of retrieving it....

YMMV - I don’t claim to have any one-size-fits-all answers that will suit everyone - I can only share my thinking and my preparations (some of them, anyway) for my local conditions....

[GonzoGOP]

However, if you’re thinking long term, ya gotta be thinking in terms of agriculture and that means irrigation - and that means a substantial natural supply of water, and the means of retrieving it....

Ya I was thinking short term. 110 gallons of pure fresh water givs you three months to come up with a way of A) getting more gas for the generator B) getting a hand pump set up. C) Order being restored for an hour so you can run the pump and refill the barrels. Kind of like why the advice is to put away a years worth of food. It isn't that we only expect to live for one year. It is that give a year we can probably find an additional source of food. There is an old saying that the difference between difficulty and disaster is how much time you have.

[Uncle Ike]

By the bye - all of us ‘packrats’ will be rewarded in the SHTF ‘hereafter’ - if we have a goodly assortment of nuts and bolts and nails and scrap metal and wood and pipe and wire and miscellaneous parts (the piles of stuff in the back of the shed that we keep promising the better half we’ll do something about), there’s no limit to what can be improvised and/or repaired in a pinch....

In the same vein - hand tools are a necessity... If electricity fails, all of those fancy SKIL and Black&Decker and Ryobi tools will only be good for canibalizing for parts...