I was talking to the ladies at the grocery store earlier this evening. They were laughing that customers had bought up every single bottle of water in the store, in a panic over all the rain.
People in a non-lobotomized state might have just bought a bucket.
They might be thinking it is still illegal to catch rainwater there.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104643521
Some places hit you with a hefty fine for diverting rain water for personal use. Could have been non-natives buying it all.
Do you know that a common problem with floods of the nature that you have just had in Colorado and we had in June in Calgary is that the water treatment plants can be overwhelmed with both sediment and farm runoff (ie shit ) and that boil water advisories are not uncommon after these floods. When out shopping during our rain in June the wife and I bot a flat of bottled water since it doesn’t go bad and we knew it would get used camping etc and we thought how stupid would we feel if we didn’t grab some water and the treatment plants went down. We were fine but several towns in Alberta had their water systems fail with either no water or with undrinkable water.
FWIE — We always keep two – 2.5 gallon containers (recycled from kitty litter containers – well cleaned of course) of frozen water in the freezer for just such weather events (we live in a hurricane area) as well as other purposes. Other purposes – We take the frozen water from our home freezer to use in our ice box on the sailboat for cooling purposes as well as for drinking as the ice melts. Get out on the boat at least once/month resulting in changing the water enough to keep it fresh.
Should a hurricane come, we fill the bathtub with water for non-potable use. Never really thought about buying water in plastic bottles before though. But then you know what ‘boat’ stands for – Break Out Another Thousand so we try to be a little more creative with our purchases – We will now refer to that creativeness as Goddard’s Bucket Theory.