No one goes to a ballgame to stock up on $5 bottles of water...
Force retailers to keep bottles of water at $0.50/bottle and the sensible thing to do post-disaster if the water supply is uncertain is to buy all of them. In the worst case, you bought something at a normal price that won't spoil essentially ever. In a not unexpected case, you have secured a supply of water for yourself and family and have something that may be barter-able for other supplies that you might need.
Here a compromise might be something like caps on price increases (maybe max 500%) and some mild rules to prevent hoarding. I remember reading something like that in actual law, but it's been a while and I'm not sure about details anymore.
It's also interesting many forms of disaster relief are provided by the governments or non-profits instead by the free market directly. This development seems like a good indicator that free markets might have significant drawbacks in such situations.
See the quote from the Texas AG in the article here: https://abcnews.go.com/US/texas-attorney-general-warns-price...
[Illegal to sell] fuel, food, medicine or another necessity
at an exorbitant or excessive price
I wonder what the caselaw looks like, and what are some actual price multipliers involved in successful and failed prosecutions.
[1] Sometimes vague standards like that are deliberately designed to incentive conservative behavior while permitting equitable treatment (give defendant benefit of a doubt) in actual disputes. Being scared you could easily run afoul of the law is partly the point. That works better when designed for enforcement by private plaintiffs where quantifiable harm must plausibly have occurred. It's prone to abuse when enforced by regulators preemptively as there's no limiting factor of manifest harm. If everybody was happy to pay $50, no harm no foul. If somebody's grandmother passed out from dehydration because she couldn't afford a bottle even though the shelves were full, then not only do we have harm but we have a concrete context to gauge "excessive". Preemptive enforcement lacks these contextualizing facts.
At a $100 water bottle price though, I can literally afford to use a helicopter to bring in water. At $20 per water bottle, I'm not sure I could afford to use a helicopter to bring water in, especially if I have to use hours of fuel in each direction.
I agree that you have to keep order. People who think their life is at risk will get violent and reckelss, and we need to limit that. But if you hit a point where water is worth $100, you are probably already past the point of keeping order.
How does price-fixing solve that problem?
However if the same bottle is sold for 1€ or 10€ then I'll think twice before pulling out the bottle, and I might even open a stand to sell part of my provisions for less to undercut the competition.
Price gouging in this context might imply existing suppliers with more than enough supply to keep water at affordable rates until new supply comes online, but who choose to charge exorbitant prices simply because they can. Or more realistically, they charge just below the price at which outside suppliers could profitably enter the market given the temporarily enormous transaction costs (e.g. transport) in emergency situations.
Furthermore, when discussing essentials such as water, society cannot tolerate a system that explicitly puts people into conflict. Maintenance of law & order requires a minimal degree of equal treatment regardless of circumstance as part of the social contract. And while we can argue that a $100 bottle of water might help to ensure that, e.g., only the severely sick receive water because, facing imminent death, they or someone close them is willing to pay the price, often the price may far exceed what the impoverished are capable of affording, no matter how they value it. Again, maintenance of the social contract--incentivizing the impoverished not to begin violating property rights--is often a collective action problem and not something free markets can ensure.
I agree that people use "price gouging" far too liberally and don't appreciate how price signaling works to moderate supply and demand, but there are situations where free markets cannot adequately serve a population.