Of the six essentials, water is the one you cannot do without for long and the one hardest to improvise. When the tap stops, or when what comes out of it can no longer be trusted, everything else in the household gets harder within hours: drinking, cooking, washing hands, taking medicine, keeping a baby or an elder clean. That is why it is step three on Start Here, right after the plan.
This page explains what to keep and why. Ready.gov says how much water to store for each person and for how long, and the EPA explains how to make water safe when you must. Those pages are cited below, and this site does not restate their numbers in its own words.
Why it matters
Water service depends on electricity to pump and treat it, on pipes that earthquakes and freezes break, and on treatment plants that storms and wildfires can knock out. Any of those can interrupt the supply. Just as often, the water keeps flowing but a boil-water or do-not-drink advisory is issued because the system cannot guarantee it is safe. Both situations look the same from your kitchen: the water you assumed would be there is not usable.
Stored water turns that from an emergency into an inconvenience. You are not stockpiling for a catastrophe. You are buying the time it takes for a utility to fix a main or lift an advisory.
What to have
Stored drinking water, in the amount Ready.gov recommends for the people and pets in your home, for the length of time it recommends. Commercially bottled water is the simplest. Water you bottle yourself goes into clean, food-grade containers that have never held anything but water; Ready.gov describes what to use and what to avoid, and how to store it.
A cool, dark place to keep it, away from chemicals and fuel, and a date written on the containers so you know when to rotate them.
A way to make more water safe. Boiling and disinfecting with plain household bleach are the methods the EPA describes for emergencies, and its page gives the amounts and the times. Keep unscented bleach and a dropper or measuring spoon with your supplies, and keep a printed copy of the EPA instructions with them, because you will not be looking them up on a dead phone.
Clean containers for collecting and carrying water, since a distribution point or a neighbor’s well only helps if you can bring water home.
Extra for washing. Drinking is not the only use. Hand-washing, dishes, and keeping a toilet usable all take water; Sanitation covers that side.
The Red Cross kit list includes water alongside everything else, and is a good cross-check that you have not forgotten something.
Water already in your home
A house holds more clean water than most people realize. Ready.gov’s water page lists the places to look — the water heater tank, the ice in the freezer, and others — and explains how to reach each safely and which sources are never for drinking. Read that section before an emergency, not during one, because getting water out of a water heater safely takes a step or two you want to have thought about.
What to do when it stops
- Find out whether it is an outage or an advisory. Your water utility and your county emergency management office announce both. If an advisory is in force, follow it exactly, including for brushing teeth, ice and pet water; the notice says what the water may and may not be used for.
- Protect what is still in the house. If a main has broken or contamination is suspected, Ready.gov explains when and how to shut off the water coming into your home so that what is in the pipes and the water heater stays clean.
- Use stored water first, in order. Drinking and medicines come first, then cooking, then hygiene. Save water by not running anything you do not need to.
- Treat water only if you must, and only as the EPA describes. Cloudy water, water from an unknown source, or water under an advisory is treated before use, by the method and the amounts on the EPA page. Guessing at a ratio is the most common water mistake.
- Listen for distribution points. Utilities and counties often set them up during a long interruption. Bring your own containers.
Who may need help
People who cannot carry water: elders, anyone using a walker or wheelchair, a parent alone with small children. Households that rely on a well with an electric pump, who lose water the moment the power goes. Anyone on a medication that must be taken with water or that raises the risk of dehydration. People who did not hear the advisory because it came by text or in a language they do not read. A knock on the door with a filled container is a real act of neighboring.
What not to do
Do not drink from sources Ready.gov says never to use for drinking. Do not assume water that looks clear is safe when an advisory is in force. Do not guess at bleach amounts or boiling times; the EPA page is short, and it is there for exactly this. Do not store water in containers that held anything else. And do not wait for a warning to fill containers — by then the store shelves and the pressure in the pipes are both dropping.
Longer disruptions
Past the first days, a household’s stored water runs down and the question becomes where water comes from and how it is kept safe, week after week. That is a systems problem: which neighbor has a well, where the county sets up distribution, whether rain can be collected and how that water is treated. The EPA page stays your authority for treatment; your county emergency management office is the authority for supply. This is also where Community matters more than any one household’s shelf.