Ohhhhmmmmm. Ohhhhmmmmm. Lets all just chill before the administrators shut down the thread and start administrating.
Marketing and the media have changed people's perception of tap water over the last 40-50 years. That's capitalism; supply, marketing, and demand. The profit margins in bottled water are astronomical. The Swiss company Nestle pays $546 a year to the Federal government to take tens of millions of gallons of water annually out of a mountain creek here in CA. They make hundreds of millions of dollars from that cheap water source, and the drought we had for many years did not stop them. Even when people brought it to the attention of the state and local governments, their response was "well, in the grand scheme of things, it is such small amount of the total water used by the state." Meanwhile the same government officials were telling us not to flush our toilets to save water. It was truly hysterical.
I have water stored in my garage, but it isn't in plastic bottles. Several years ago, when my wife and I went to the desert to participate in an art festival you might have heard of, Burning Man, it just didn't make sense to take bottled water for the five gallons a day we'd need to bathe, drink, cook, and clean. The festival is all about leaving no trace and radical self reliance. A bunch of empty plastic bottles that I had to haul off the playa seemed to contradict the spirit of Burning Man. My solution? Inexpensive 5 gallon mylar water bladders filled from the tap, kept secure inside HD buckets with lids. Worked beautifully for the week for all our water needs, supplemented by melt water from the ice in our coolers to bathe (heated in solar showers). I still change out the water stored in the garage once or twice a year, sanitizing the bladders before they are refilled. Who knows when we might need it?
People who need emergency water, who haven't prepared with storage containers, don't have too many options other than bottled water, especially if they can't think outside the box (bathtubs, ice chests, Tupperware containers, Ziplock bags, HD buckets, etc).
Water, the essence of life, especially when used to make beer.