Blackout Water

If you have kids or grandkids, please take five minutes and read this👆

My neighbor's husband came home from a work trip to Washington last month and started quietly shutting his family's life down. Sold the bass boat he spent six years fixing up. Cancelled the Alaska cruise for their 35th anniversary. Moved money out of the bank. Talked his son into hauling the grandkids back from Phoenix. His wife was sure a doctor had given him bad news and he was hiding it from her. He told me the real reason over our back fence, and it came down to one word. That was three weeks ago. I still haven't told my husband. But I've quietly done every single thing he told me to do, before the rest of this street figures it out. His name is Warren. 61 years old. Thirty-four years in fuel logistics. The steadiest man I know. I've lived next door to Warren and Marlene for 14 years. Our grandkids run through the same sprinkler. Warren leaves Monday and comes home Thursday. Houston mostly. This year, a lot of Washington. Doesn't say much. Waves from the mower. You ask him something, you get the answer and nothing extra. In 14 years I have not once seen that man rattled. So when he started acting odd in August, I noticed. First it was the boat. Then the cruise. Marlene had that brochure on her fridge since Christmas. Then the bank. She found the withdrawal slips in his jacket pocket. Then a moving truck pulled in from Phoenix. Their son Kyle, his wife, two little girls and the dog. Into the basement "for a while." Nobody would tell her why. Then the deliveries started. Plain brown boxes. A whole pallet one time. Straight into his shop with the door pulled shut behind him. Marlene sat at my kitchen table on a Wednesday and cried. "He's sick. I know he's sick. He got some kind of news and he's putting his affairs in order and he won't tell me." I didn't know what to say to her. Then Saturday morning I was at the sink, looked out my kitchen window, and saw Warren doing something I have never seen him do in 14 years. He was splitting firewood. Two cords at least, dumped beside his shop. Warren out there in his work shirt with a maul, swinging. Warren and Marlene have gas logs. They've had gas logs since the day they moved in. He'd been at it better than an hour. No radio. No gloves. Just swinging. I stood there and watched him a good 20 minutes. Then I poured two coffees and walked out to the fence. "Warren." He stopped. "Brought you a coffee." He looked at the maul. Looked at the pile. Looked at me. Then he leaned the maul on the stump and came over. "Thank you." "Warren, what on earth are you doing?" "Getting some wood in." "Wood." "Yep." "For the gas logs." "Wood stove's coming Thursday." I laughed. He didn't. "Warren. Come on now." "It's a stove. People have stoves. It's no big thing." "A box of candles is no big thing. You've got a lumber yard back there." I nearly got a smile out of him. "Marlene thinks I've gone off the deep end." "Marlene thinks you're dying. She sat at my table Wednesday and cried about it." That one got to him. He looked down in his cup. "I know. She asked me straight out that night." "She thinks you've got six months and you won't tell her, Warren." "I know." "So what is it really." Nothing. He drank some coffee. Looked off past his shop at the tree line. I waited. "You know I can't talk about work." "I didn't ask about work." "Anything I've got to say right now is work." I kept my mouth shut. "I've sat in a lot of rooms since the spring. That's all it is." "All right." "A few of them I'd have paid good money not to be in." I came at it another way. "Warren. What are you getting ready for?" That one he felt. He let out a long breath. "You been following the oil thing? The strait?" "Hormuz. Sure. Gas is ridiculous again. It's all anybody talks about after church." He nodded slow. "That's the piece you're allowed to watch." "Meaning what." "Meaning the news shows you the ships. The rooms I've been in aren't about ships. They're about what gets done here, at home, once fuel gets short enough. None of that's been on your TV." "What gets done." He went quiet again. Then: "You remember 2020?" "Which part." "The part where somebody decided which stores were essential. Where they told you how many people could sit at your own table at Thanksgiving. Where two weeks turned into a year." "I remember." "Well, they kept the binder. All of that got built once and nobody took it apart." I went cold right down both arms. "Kept it for what." "For this. Same binder. New reason." "Warren." "Fuel goes first. They won't call it rationing, they'll call it a conservation order. So many gallons per household per week. Odd and even days by your license plate. Military and hospitals fill up first, then farms, then trucking. You and me get what's left and a line to stand in." "That doesn't happen in America." "It did happen in America. 1973. You and I are both old enough to remember our dads sitting in those lines. And it's happening right now. Slovenia started rationing gas in March. Fifty liters a day. The Philippines declared a national energy emergency that same week. We're not at the front of the line. But we're in it." "Okay." "Then trucking. Diesel goes where they say it goes. Store shelves get thin, then patchy. Flights get cut and they'll blame prices." "Okay." "Then the power. Plants get told to throttle back. Brownouts. An hour. Then an afternoon. Kindly don't run your air conditioner between two and seven." "Warren." "And 2020 had an end because a virus runs its course. This one runs until the oil moves. They signed a deal in June and it was dead in three days. The truce fell apart in July. The Navy's cleared better than a hundred suspected mines out of that water and the ships still won't go. There's one pipeline across Saudi Arabia that gets oil around the strait. One side door, and everything is leaning on it. Nobody in those rooms is talking in weeks." I just stood there. "That's why Kyle and the girls are in my basement. That's why the boat's gone. That's why there's a stove coming Thursday." "All right. So what do I do?" He looked at me a while. Then he sort of laughed. A worn out laugh. "Tell you the truth, everything I just listed is the easy part." "Easy?" "It's what your grandmother would've done without anybody telling her. Anybody who sat in a gas line in '73. None of it takes inside knowledge. It's chores." "You sold a boat you loved, Warren. Don't stand there and tell me that's chores." "It is to the people who know." I didn't answer him. "None of that is what has me up at three in the morning." "Then what does." Long drink of coffee. "Something that came up about a month in. One slide, in a room I only got into because somebody was out sick. They spent four minutes on it and went on. I'd give up every box in that shop before I'd give up my answer to it." "Your answer to what?" He looked right at me. "Water." "Water?" "When this gets bad, clean water is the whole ballgame. Ahead of cash. Ahead of a full tank. Ahead of that wood pile." "Water." "You can be hungry a good while. You can get through a cold house with blankets. You get about three days without water. And the day every household in the country works that out at the same time, it's done." "Done how." "Austin, Texas, 2018. One boil notice. The stores were out of bottled water in hours. Hours. And that was one city, with the trucks all running and the rest of the country to pull from. Now do every city at once with diesel on a conservation order." "But we've got the tap." "The tap goes too. Nobody ever sees that one coming." "Warren." "Water gets to your house because electric pumps push it there. Pumps lose power, the pressure drops, and when the pressure drops, whatever's in the ground around those old pipes can get pulled inside them. That's why they tell you to boil. I didn't make that up, it's in the EPA's own guidance." "Texas, February 2021. Grid went down in the cold. Over fourteen million people had their water knocked out or messed up. Some of the boil notices ran past a month. The man who ran the state's own environmental agency told a reporter he was on day four with no water at his house. Him, his family, his dog and eight chickens." "Fourteen million." "Fourteen million. From a cold snap. Asheville after the hurricane, fifty-three days before they could drink from the tap. Jackson, Mississippi, close to seven weeks. Richmond, Virginia, January of last year. One power outage at the water plant and the whole city was boiling water." "Every one of those was weather. One place at a time. With the whole rest of the country standing by to send trucks." "What I'm telling you about is everywhere at once. And nobody's standing by, because everybody's in it." He set his cup on the fence post. "Picture it. Your grandbabies are thirsty. The store's empty. The tap's running brown, or it isn't running. There's no truck coming because the truck has no diesel. And you're stood in your kitchen trying to work out what goes in the sippy cup." "Don't." "I know. I'm sorry. But that's the one that gets me up at night. Everybody's staring at the gas pump. Nobody's looking at the faucet." "This can't be right." "Ask yourself why every headline says oil and not one of them says water. The folks in those rooms know how this goes. They won't say it out loud, because the minute they do, the water aisle is empty by supper. That's what 'avoiding a panic' means." "All right. So what are you doing about it?" He looked at his cup. "We're covered." "What's that mean." "Means we're covered." "Warren." "I'd rather leave it there." "You haven't left one thing there in twenty minutes." Nothing. "Warren. You just stood my granddaughter in my kitchen with an empty sippy cup. You do not get to say that to me and go back to chopping wood." He looked at me a long moment. "It's not something I'm meant to be passing around." "Passing what around." "What people in my line of work are doing at their own houses." "Tell me." He sighed. Looked at the shop. Looked at the wood. Looked back at me. "There's an item. One particular item. Everybody I trust in this business has them. The fella who runs our Gulf terminals. A woman on my team who did twenty years in the Coast Guard before she came to us. My boss ordered ten back in the spring, for his kids and the lake place, when all anybody else was buying was gas cans." "What item." "It's small. It's cheap, considering. It's no secret, you could look it up tonight. It's just that nobody outside my little world has tied it to any of this yet." "Warren. What is it." One more long look. Then: "Stay put." He went in his shop. Came back out with something in his hand. Black tube. Maybe nine inches. About the size of a flashlight. He held it up. "This." "A flashlight?" "A water filter. A straw, they call it. You can drink through it straight out of a pond. Or it threads onto a regular water bottle, any standard one. Rain barrel. Creek. The bathtub you filled before the pressure dropped. No batteries. Nothing to plug in. One of these is good for 1,800 gallons." "And that's what..." "That's what we've all got. There's one in Marlene's glove box, she just doesn't know what it is. One in each of the girls' backpacks. That's the item." "That little thing." "That's why it works. Goes in a purse. Needs no power and no refills. And nobody can put it on a conservation order." "Warren, does that thing actually work?" "I'll let you answer that yourself in about five minutes. You got an empty water bottle in your recycling? Go get it." I went and got one. Plain store water bottle out of the bin. Followed him around the back of his shop. There's a rain barrel back there under the downspout. Been there since before we moved in. Nobody's cleaned it in years. Brown. Leaves rotting in the bottom. You wouldn't let a dog drink out of it. He took the lid off. Took my bottle. Pushed it down under the surface and let it fill. It came up the color of old dishwater with bits turning over in it. Then he threaded the straw on where the cap goes. Handed it to me. "Drink." "Warren." "Drink." "You go first." That got a real grin out of him. He took it back, tipped it up and drank a good third of it. Wiped his mouth on his sleeve. Handed it over. I looked at it for a while. Then I drank. I was braced for it to taste the way that barrel smells. It tasted like nothing. Like the water out of my fridge door. No grit. No pond. No smell. I held the bottle up to the light. What was in the bottle was still brown. What came through the straw was clear. "Well, I'll be." "That's all there is to it." "And it does that with anything?" "Anything fresh. It won't do the ocean, it can't take out salt. But a creek, a pond, a lake, rain water, a stock tank. The tub you filled." "And what's it take out." "There's two stages in there. A membrane that goes down to 0.01 micron. That's what stops bacteria and parasites, the stuff that puts you on the bathroom floor. Then a carbon stage for chemicals and sediment." I stood there holding the bottle. "Warren, where do you even get one." "Same place everybody I work with got theirs. I'll write it down for you." He unscrewed the straw and put it in my hand. "Keep that one. I've got a case. I'll leave you some tomorrow. Give them to your kids. Tell them it's from their mother and she'll sleep better. Leave me out of it. They don't have to believe a word of this. They just have to have it in a drawer on the day." "Warren." "Forget the wood stove if you want. Forget the cash and every other thing I said. I wouldn't. But you could. This one you can't skip." "All right." "When the orders come and everybody's standing in a line for their allotment, the woman with one of these in her purse isn't standing in the water line. There's a word I keep landing on for that. Free. Whatever they shut off, it stops at the edge of that pond down the road for anybody who owns one of these." "Most folks are going to hear about this on the six o'clock news. That's a week too late. You're hearing it from me, today, over a fence. Do something with it." He went back to his wood pile. I went inside. Put it in the junk drawer next to the batteries. Told myself Warren had sat in too many meetings. I left it there two days. Then I sat down with my iPad and started checking up on him. Slovenia really did start rationing gas in March. First country in the EU to do it. The Philippines really did declare a national energy emergency. The head of the International Energy Agency called this "the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market." In April he went on CNBC and said "We are facing the biggest energy security threat in history." Every single thing Warren said about the oil side checked out. Then I looked up Texas. February 2021. 14.4 million people with their water disrupted. 190 counties. Just like he said. Right down to the man with the eight chickens. Warren left a grocery sack hanging on my back door handle the next morning. Didn't knock. Four more of them inside. I called my daughter that afternoon and said I was coming over. I gave her two. One for her kitchen, one for her husband's truck. I drove to my son's and gave him two. One for the house, one for the diaper bag. The one from the fence stayed in my junk drawer. My son gave me the look. Same one he's been giving me since he was fifteen. Doesn't bother me one bit. If you've had a feeling for a while now that something is off, that the news keeps walking around something without ever saying it, you are not going crazy. The people who deal with this for a living already took care of their own houses. Quietly. No announcement. Warren had one thing dead right. By the time it's on the six o'clock news, the shelf is already bare. The person in the line is the person who heard last. This is the same straw Warren handed me over the fence. I've put the link below. I'm not a prepper. I'm a grandmother with a junk drawer. But when the orders come and the lines start, I'd like to be the woman who took care of it back in September. 👉 https://www.tryblackoutwater.com/pages/advertorial EDITED: On September 11th, drones hit that pipeline across Saudi Arabia and shut it down. The one that carries oil around the strait. Warren's side door. I'd written it on the back of an envelope the night he told me. I've still got the envelope. On September 13th, eight ships went through the strait. Eight. It used to be about 85 a day. Another ship got hit that same day. Iran's parliament speaker says it "will remain closed until Iran's conditions are met." AAA said gas jumped 13 cents in a single week. Then last Wednesday my phone rang before 6 in the morning. My sister, out in Wichita. The main water plant there lost power around 5am. It was already running on backup generators because of a storm, and the generators quit. 45 minutes. That's all it was. The pressure dropped and about half a million people, roughly one out of every six people in the state of Kansas, got told to boil their water. Some of the elementary schools closed. The last of it wasn't cleared until Sunday afternoon. She sent me a picture from her Dillons. The water aisle. Bare metal shelves. No war in Kansas. No conservation order. A generator that didn't do its job for 45 minutes. "The tap goes too." He said that to me not three weeks before my own sister was boiling water on the stove to make her coffee. I made this post because I couldn't keep sitting on it. Not after Wichita. Warren still leaves Monday and comes home Thursday. Marlene knows he isn't sick now. He finally sat her down and told her all of it. She says he's at the kitchen table at three most nights. I haven't asked what the meetings are about these days. I don't believe I want to know. My sister ordered a 5-pack from that same kitchen while her water was still on boil. My daughter ordered one too, the night I sent her the Wichita story. My son hasn't ordered a thing. He did leave the one in the diaper bag though. I checked. I went back on the site myself this morning and read every line of the fine print before I told one more person to spend money. Here's what I found. The 5-pack is the one they've got marked most popular, and it comes with a survival guide and 16 emergency checklists thrown in free. Shipping is free. And you get 365 days to change your mind. A full year. "No forms to fill out. No evidence required." Those are their words, I copied them down. So if you've read this far and you're on the fence, you've got a year to decide I'm a silly old woman. I hope I am. 👉 https://www.tryblackoutwater.com/pages/advertorial P.S. I finally told my husband. All of it, start to finish. Even the part about the sippy cup. He sat there and didn't say a word the whole time. When I was done he got up, went to the junk drawer, took out the one Warren gave me, walked it out to the garage and put it in the door pocket of his truck. Then he came back in and said two words. "Order more." I already had. P.P.S. If you're wondering how many, here's how I worked it out. One for every person in the house. One for each car, because you won't be home when it happens, you'll be at the grocery or at church. One in the bag by the door. For the two of us that came to five, which is how they sell them anyway. My daughter's house needed five too. If you only get one, fine, get the one. But count heads first. P.P.P.S. Each straw is good for 1,800 gallons. The government's own Ready.gov page says to figure a gallon per person per day. Do that math. That's years, from a creek or a pond or a rain barrel or the tub you filled ahead of time. 0.01 micron membrane plus a carbon stage, so it's bacteria, parasites, sediment and chemicals. No batteries. Nothing to charge. There's no expiry date on them either, the site says they'll keep in a drawer 10 years. Free shipping, and the 365 day money back guarantee I told you about. Warren wouldn't have hung a sack of them on my door and told me to hand them to my grandkids if they didn't work. That was enough for me. P.P.P.P.S. If you're thinking you'll just stack up water in the garage instead, I did that too, and you should. But think about what Warren is doing with that wood pile. Wood burns down. So does stored water. Whatever you've got on those shelves, it's a number that only goes one direction. And when it hits zero the tap isn't safe and the truck isn't coming. The straw is a different kind of thing. As long as there's a pond or a creek or rain coming off a roof somewhere you can walk to, you have water you can drink. One runs out. The other one doesn't. Get the straw. 👉 https://www.tryblackoutwater.com/pages/advertorial