I dunno, but I’m leaning towards stupider and stupider! I live in Anchorage, AK where you can expect to drive on snow and ice six or more months of the year. We had our first snow of the season over the weekend (late), only a couple of inches. There were 103 reported accidents on ANC roads during and after the snow! In this part of the World, you don’t notice two inches of snow and you go to work if you got two feet, yet 103 people managed to wreck their vehicles on a minor dusting of snow. Now, granted, ANC is very transient and has lots of military, so maybe this weekend was some people’s first experience with driving on snow, but 103 wrecks of presumable relatively modern, mostly front or four-wheel drive cars on at minimum all-weather radial tires. Studded snow tires have been legal since Sept. 15, but I suspect a lot of people, like me, haven’t put them on because they’re rough, noisy, and wear out quickly on dry roads.

And to the point of the story about water shortages, if Katrina taught nothing else it should have taught everyone that they needed enough supplies and equipment to live totally on their own for a minimum of three to five days, so a stash of bottled water or some emergency water jugs is pretty much an essential, but as someone pointed out, you can melt snow and as long as its not yellow, you can safely drink it. If you’re paranoid, you can boil it or put bleach in it but as long as it is clean it is perfectly potable and probably cleaner than the tap water in most of the urban Northeast.