The genius move I heard of was to throw a few 5-gal jugs of water up in your attic (!!!). It's relatively shelf-stable, standardized size, and "in case of emergency" you can even use it as a gravity-flowed spout to fill smaller containers below.
I've taken to trying to have a minimal set of 4 one liter steel water bottles hung in the closet (grab + go) all the time. So convenient to be able to "just grab some water" on the way out the door, and is the start of a solid emergency prep station.
If it's kept in plastic containers, it's probably only good for a year or so before enough stuff leaches into the water that it'll last off and funky. The time period decreases significantly if your attic gets hot (like a lot of them do).
I want my regular drinking water to be as free of microplastics as possible, but is contamination from plastic containers dangerous enough to be of any concern during an emergency situation?
If one is going to do that, I'd strongly recommend putting them in some kind of basin that can hold the water if it escapes from the jugs, or sturdier containers, or both.
At least in the US, water jugs are generally very flimsy. An attic is likely to have wide temperature variations throughout the year, and leaky water jugs up there could cause some expensive damage.
Yeah we had plastic jugs in our cool basement leak all over the concrete floor — I can’t imagine the disaster that would be to have plastic jugs in my 140F attic with resultant leaking down from the ceiling
I've taken to trying to have a minimal set of 4 one liter steel water bottles hung in the closet (grab + go) all the time. So convenient to be able to "just grab some water" on the way out the door, and is the start of a solid emergency prep station.