Maybe it's not a bad idea to keep a cellar of canned, non-perishable food and water stored in containers that do not leech.
You would want to replace the stockpile every few years so it doesn't spoil.
You would want to replace the stockpile every few years so it doesn't spoil.
Water is often the under-appreciated stock --- people use a lot of it for drinking, cleaning, and cooking (espeically with dried / reconstituted foods). Here a supply, and means of producing more potable supply (a quality filtration system, backpacker and marine filtering systems are useful) and purification (chlorine or iodine in liquid or tablet form) help.
It's possible to store grains (whole or ground, flour, wheat, rice, maize) for years, though you need to get rid of moths / worms first. That usually means freezing in smaller portions (2.5 -- 5 kg / 5--10 lb), and then transferring to airtight storage. Rodents can and will chew through both plastic and metal, isnpect frequently. Invest in a cat (or snakes). A chest freezer won't survive a long-duration power-outage, but is useful so long as juice flows, and can make this pest-proofing much more viable. These consume very little power.
I'd say you have more of a need for a water stock pile in Arizona than in Singapore. We get more than two metres of rain a year here.
(Of course, even in Singapore you can get unlucky and hit a dry spell for a few weeks. But they are rather rare.
The city has dedicated a lot of its land to water reservoirs.)
The 2m of rainfall in Singapore won't do you much good if it's contaminated.
And water is far more essential to life. A person can survive only a few minutes without air, or a few days without water. It's possible to live without (or with sharply limited) food for weeks or months.
A single closet shelf might provide a very rudimentary sufficient food supply for weeks.
Average per-person household water usage in the US is 80--100 gallons/day (300--380 liter). About 1 gallon (4 liter) is for drinking, roughly twice that for food prep / cooking, and the remainder for cleaning and sanitation.
A 1m x 1m x 2m closet (2 m^3) could hold a bit over 500 gallons (2,000 liter), or about a week's worth of average daily water use for one person.
Under emergency conditions that could be stretched considerably, but even at 5 gallon/day (~20 liter), a week's supply of water for a household of four would be over 0.5 m^3.
My point: You need a lot of water, and will suffer quickly without it.
> The 2m of rainfall in Singapore won't do you much good if it's contaminated.
If you collect it directly as rainwater, should be fine?
How clean your water has to be and how much you need depends also on your energy budget.
If you have limitless energy, you can distill almost basically source of water, and get something potable out. (If you have large but not infinite amounts of energy, you can eg condense water from the air. Our dew point in Singapore is typically roughly around 24C almost all the time.
Singapore as a country has also heavily invested in recycling of water, see eg https://www.pub.gov.sg/watersupply/fournationaltaps/newater and we also have some desalination going. And the reservoirs I already talked about.
The scenario initially proposed was a supply-chain disruption long enough to plan for at least one, and perhaps a substantial number of planting / cultivation / harvesting scenarios. In any significantly urbanised location (and Singapore is very highly urbansied), there's simply not enough arable land to provide food for the local population.
As a rough estimate, one person requires about 0.5 hectare of land to support them. Singapore has a population of 5.4 million on an area of 733 km^2 (73,000 ha). Given the per-capita requirement, the area could support a population of about 146,000, or the population of 5.4 million would require an agricultural area of 27,000 km^2 (2.7 million ha).
Considering other possible scenarios (hurricane / typhoon, major flooding event, tsunami, earthquake, wildfire, etc.) it's quite possible that structures or containers for large-volume storage would be destroyed, damaged, and/or contaminated. Again my point with water being that large quantities are required even in reduced-usage emergency scenarios and that quality and not merely quantity matters.
In most of these scenarios, your energy budget to a substantial extent is your body's own muscle power. That might be supplemented by fire (do you have fuel), animal power, or (do you have fuel) engines or generators.
Many regions have official or unofficial groups which provide training and coordination for disaster planning and contingencies. Participating in one locally might help in moving understanding from a theoretical to practical basis.
(Just like New York City or London wouldn't be able to feed themselves.)
Luckily, at least we don't have to worry about hurricanes / typhoons, tsunamis, earthquakes or wildfire here. Flooding might still happen.
> In most of these scenarios, your energy budget to a substantial extent is your body's own muscle power. That might be supplemented by fire (do you have fuel), animal power, or (do you have fuel) engines or generators.
Depends on what kind of scenario you are planning for. Also, in Singapore you have plenty of solar power. So you could use some of that for evaporating water.
> Many regions have official or unofficial groups which provide training and coordination for disaster planning and contingencies. Participating in one locally might help in moving understanding from a theoretical to practical basis.
Oh, there's definitely groups for that one here. I'm actually happy to leave that to other people, and the government is also doing a pretty good job.
Btw, my original point wasn't actually meant to talk about Singapore as a city. I was just meaning to comparing water needs in Arizona vs some wet place. So I perhaps should have picked some place in rural Malaysia for our comparison. (Malaysia is a neighbour of Singapore.)
If you're storing that in 30WM1G bottles (an HDPE 1-gallon milk bottle), the dimensions are 6"x6"x10" per bottle.
You need 28 * 4 or 112 bottles.
That's 12,096 in^2, or 84ft^2, or 7.8m^2 of storage area.
If you've a 1 m^2 shelf, you'd need nearly 8 shelves spaced at roughly 30 cm, or 2.4 m vertical (7.8 ft) just for a month's worth of water storage.
You. Need. A. Lot. Of. Water.
For grains ... say, a 1.2 kg (42 oz) container of oats, you've got 150 kilocalories per 40g, or about 4,500 kcal per container. A human needs a minimum (we're talking emergency survival rations) of about 2500 kcal/day. Not a balanced or interesting diet, but for bulk calories, a starting point.
A month's supply for four is then just over 62 containers. Which takes up 1.2 m^2 of shelf space. Water requires 6.5 times the storage even with an absolute minimum daily allocation.
There are denser grains. Even with oats, steel-cut roughly doubles the caloric density per unit volume.
It's much easier to provision a long-term food storage than a long-term water storage.
This is why survival water planning often revolves around purification rather than, or in addition to, storage.
(I also have options for handling impure water)
Hm, i will ask my wife whoch one she wants
They also don't purr.
When the pandemic hit, we just bought another 25 lb bag each of lentils and millet and called it good.