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You're not alone. It is always better to be prepared for emergencies however small the likely-hood of such a thing happening.
I have had the experience of living through an ice storm many years ago that left a city of 35K without power, cable, telephone or running water for two weeks and surrounding rural areas for months in Mississippi (yeah go figure, ice in MS). Imagine people fist fighting for Coleman lamps, bottled water, fuel, and generators before the truck was even unloaded! I'm sure the same level of disaster today would yield much worse results.
We usually take electricity, water, cable, dsl, ect.. for granted but outages happen sometimes without warning.
What you're describing is just a small part of what could happen and it does make you think differently about things.
There are several good websites for survival and emergency preparedness that would benefit everyone.
http://www.survivalist.info/
http://www.bwolf.com/
http://www.ready.gov/america/getakit/index.html
These are a few of my favorites but there are many more good informational websites for emergency preparedness.
I'm sure there are probably more forum posts for this kind of topic but that's my 2 cents.
thanks,