"It was only going to be for a few minutes, until the rain let up."
It's the second evening of an ice storm. The power went out a little after breakfast the day before, and the utility's outage map still says "assessing."
The couple in this example are in their mid-sixties. They're practical people. They've been through outages before, and the first day went fine: flashlights, a pot of soup on the camp stove out on the back step, extra blankets, the fridge door kept shut.
By the second afternoon, though, the basement is starting to worry them. The sump pit is filling, the freezer is full of meat from the fall, and their phones are down to 20%. A neighbour lends them a portable generator.
It's sleeting hard, and it's getting dark. The generator gets set down just inside the garage with the big door rolled all the way up. "Just until the rain lets up," he says. "The door's wide open. It'll be fine."
About forty minutes later, the carbon-monoxide alarm in the hallway goes off. She had put that alarm in the previous autumn, almost as an afterthought, after reading about it in a winter-safety notice.
They do the right thing. They get everyone outside into fresh air and call 911. The fire department checks the house and finds CO levels high enough that nobody goes back in for a while.
That's the end of the story. Nobody is hurt. The alarm did its job.
What this example gets right, and what it gets wrong
Look at how many things went right. They kept the fridge closed, cooked outdoors, had flashlights ready, and had a working CO alarm. These are sensible people. Their one mistake is one of the most common in every outage season: they treated an open garage door as "outside."
According to the CPSC, it isn't. The agency's guidance is direct: never run a portable generator inside a home, garage, basement, crawlspace or shed, even with doors or windows open. Don't run one on a porch or in a carport either. Run it outside only, at least 20 feet from the house and other buildings, with the exhaust pointed away from doors, windows and vents.12 CPSC also warns that opening doors or windows "will not provide enough ventilation to prevent the buildup of lethal levels of CO," and that dangerous levels can linger for hours after a generator shuts off.4
CPSC reports that about 100 people in the US die each year from carbon-monoxide poisoning linked to portable generators.13 CO has no colour and no smell, so you can't tell it's there without an alarm.8 We're not quoting the numbers to frighten you. We're quoting them because CPSC says most generator incidents reported to it involve generators used indoors or in partly enclosed spaces.4 Those are avoidable mistakes, and the rules are easy to follow once you know them.
A plan on paper beats a plan in your head.
Most outages are a nuisance. Some last for days. The Government of Canada asks households to be ready to look after themselves for at least 72 hours.7
The problem isn't usually a lack of good intentions. It's that most people's plan is still in their heads. On night two, that plan gets made by flashlight, in a hurry, when you're tired.
Emberstead puts the plan on paper, while the weather's good.
