Red Cross To Georgia: 'Be Ready For Drought Emergency With 5 Cases Of Bottled Water Per Person'

I think the red cross is nut's. 1 gallon per day is not enough !

For a family of four, that's a suggested 56 gallons.. and thats quite a lot!

Consider the "AIR TO WATER MACHINE" that produces water without plumbing. The water is the safest and cleanest out there and the technology is american. Check out the website "AIR2WATER.COM" They have helped the UN overseas in various third world villages and have been utilized by our military.

I think they are saying, "We are going to bottle the rest of your water. If you want it, you'd better buy it before someone else does."

You see, this way the economy is saved AND drinking water is available. It's pure, mountain spring genius.

One gallon that's it?? That doesn't seem like enough!

I personally love my rain water barrels for watering the plants. I feel that puts less of a strain on the water supply here in Arizona.. More people need to do something, we need to be proactive not reactive..

The whole mess is a scary reality.. How did they let it get that bad?

56 gallons isn't all that much, considering most hot water heaters are 50 or 60 gallons unless your in an apartment.

Or like me have a tankless water heater and would be in trouble! :)

Incredibly irresponsible of the Red Cross. Want to create a gas shortage? Tell everyone that it's about to run out. Advice on tapping the water heater drain, treating non-potables, and storing in your own containers would have been much better. Then have enough in emergency storage to ration out to the masses if it got really bad.

In emergencies, 1 gallon per person is enough as far as direct intake, food prep, sponge bath, shaving rinse in a cup, etc. If you think that's icky or gross or a real hardship, try imagining 4 million in Atlanta pooping into buckets. Sure some folks have yards and can dig a hole, but think of all those that don't.

If they do actually run out, it will be more of a Katrina-scale event -- pure chaos. What % of their population do you think are conservation minded, responsible greens? Compare that to the number of uninformed sheeple that actually believe we have limitless resources and the government will take care of them.

BTW, 10 cases of water x 24 x 16oz is actually 30 gallons, not the 14 that was suggested. Was it just coincedence that there's a Dasani bottle in the pic (owned by Coca-Cola)? I hope not.
=== author's response follows ====

Whoops. You're right. A case of 24 bottles, 16 oz each is approx. 3 gallons. So, strictly speaking, the headline should be 5 cases for two weeks per person (rounding up). Average US family size is a bit under two though, so at the outset the average family should have 10 cases, per this recommendation from Red Cross.

Good points about emergency home storage. Everyone has at least one toilet tank and many have at least one bathtub to fill when it looks close. Just make sure to put a piece of plastic wrap over the drain to slow the dripping out around the tub discharge.

What's nuts isn't that Atlanta residents have to store all that water... but that the very water they're asked to buy to save them from a drought was taken from under their feet.

Sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the water bottling plants would close, then Atlanta could keep their water locally. There would be no pressure of trucking it somewhere like Minnesota or Michigan. Drought scare mitigated.

Everyone else take note and prepare for when the droughts come your way. Invest in composting toilets, serious water filters and rain-barrels now. Dont' wait til it's too late.

Maybe the Coca-cola's and the Pepsi's (etc.) should be paying for the water that they take from the people for free and sell back to them at enormous profit's. All the while contributing to local water shortages.

The obscene thing is that this scenario (i.e. recommending buying bottled water to conserve local water) will be accepted by most people as a reasonable solution. Most won't see the larger looming water privatization issue.

Unfortunately, this exact same issue is already happening in "third world" countries, where you have a bottling company bottling up the local water (it's okay, we're creating jobs!) and selling it to other countries in the form of Coke, Pespi etc. thus lowering the local water table to the extent that people who rely on wells for their water, can no longer dig deep enough to get to the water. But that's democracy in action right? Scary.

Let's not forget about pets in the household. They'll need water too.

What is truly broken is how we handle storm water; piping it into rivers and streams instead of allowing it to recharge local aquifers. Until the pipes and ponds drainage model (a relic from the 40's) is replaced by soft path stormwater handling, this will be a recurrent problem everywhere in this country; the South is just the first real example (although I did see SoCal is getting pretty tight on the H2O themselves...)

This is what I would like to have> fifty gallon drum for water.....http://theepicenter.com/water_drums_barrels_rations_and_storage_containers.html

Personally, I'm getting one of these, putting it on a trailer, then filling it at my bosses house in Tennesee (outside of the watershed).

No fooling around when it comes to my water supply!
=== author's response follows ====
A word to the wise to anyone purchasing a plastic 55 gallon drum for water storage: make absolutely certain that it is new.

NEVER re-use a plastic drum for water storage if it was previously used to hold an industrial or commercial material of any kind. Few realize that polymers are actually quite porous and will leach the former contents back out into your water over time.

If you do use a drum of any kind for water storage,- even a new one - it would be wise to charcoal filter it prior to consumption. Industrial grade drums were not designed for potable water storage.

time to blame bush, you know the routine. now come on you dehumanized machines, follow your default program flow charts.

You'd think Georgia was getting ready to sprout desert. In spite of the panic wrought by the media, there is actually just shy of a years worth of water left in our combined reservoirs under current conservation standards. (Six months if we didn't.) There are also active aquifers and even a river that runs under the entire city of Atlanta that aren't being utilized. The problem isn't the lack of water now, it's the lack of responsible management on the part of the State and Local Authorities. Next year when we're out of this drought cycle (yes, Georgia does this in 8 year cycles, it's really nothing new), you'll be hard pressed to hear anyone talking about conservation, sustainable water management practices and water management.

It seems like the whole debacle with Atlanta reflects the attitude many people have towards the whole climate change issue--even though the signs are right in our own back yards that climate change is real, many people simply choose to bury their heads in the sand and hope it will just go away, because actually dealing with it might prove too painful. The authorities down in Atlanta have known for a while that their water supply was in danger of drying up, but they chose to do too little, too late--and now it's coming back to bite them on the butt. It makes me wonder if government will really try to do anything about global warming until it's too late.