By definition, insurance is a gamble, and billion-dollar insurance industries are based upon collecting far more money than statistics would cause then to lose. The principle here is that a 1000 dollars of insurance may be worth only 500 dollars of damage. On the other hand Ben Franklin observed that “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” If you have any reason to question the stability of your current infrastructure, you can by the time you need to implement an alternative plan for acquiring water by investing a small amount in a few gallons of stored water,

At the most primitive levels hauling and, storing (see 30-gallon tank), are your only options. Since this would not include motorized transportation, the quantities involved would be small. Needless to say, this all makes gardening more of a challenge, but nobody said this was going to be easy.

This translates into an important priority at the outset of your adventure: Make sure you can guarantee yourself a supply of water.

Once the initial needs are addressed, you can plan further:

Search the area for abandoned wells or surface water, and move if necessary.
A shallow well might be drilled through creative use of available tools and hardware (see Wells).
There are various ways you can pump water from shallow wells and cisterns (see Pumps)
Large clean trash bags can make it possible to store water in an otherwise unsuitable trash can.
People have survived by using simple solar stills (see Solar Stills).
Think of something I haven’t suggested

I have seen places in a couple of countries where potable water was hauled in a truck, and each home had a plastic container of about 300 gallons where the purchased water was stored. There are good points to this system in that people are far more aware of how much water they use, and within limits, they can budget the usage to their incomes. In the event of a natural disaster, most would have a little water stored that they could live on for awhile. On a low budget, it might be more practical for a developing village to piece-meal the storage of water in among the household-sized tanks than to accumulate funds for a community-scale reservoir.

On the other hand, this makes the village quite precarious: Whoever controls the water can potentially control the village. If the truck failed, or the supplier wanted to triple the price of water, if gasoline became unavailable, or if somebody wanted to shut down the town, there would be a serious problem.