Price Controls in Emergency Cases?

Price controls are distortionary and cause all thee sort of bad effects in the economy. So i agree. But we have to worry about expectations. If retailers expect that there will be price controls o then they won't order as many. The longer the lag between the emergency and the expectation of price controls, the bigger the problem will be. It just seemed like we should have more certainty when making this anti price control argument in the case of emergencies than i generally.