A week or 9 days, during the ice storm of 1998 in Ontario…and we were in a major city.
http://tinyurl.com/pulzbpz
It was an adventure for me as a teenager, but I’m just lucky my father was raised on a farm and we had an old log-burner still installed in the basement. It might have been used a handful of times in the previous ten years, maximum. I remember curling up in a chair in the basement with the whole family of 7 in the one room, the stove on, and water boiling on the top of the casing in a pot because my father said we’d all feel warmer if the humidity was kept high. At the same time the evergreen trees outside were bowed all the way over with their tips iced to the ground, all of them, and the snow kept coming down, threatening to get higher than our windows there. I don’t remember what we ate but it must have been tinned food made in pots also…must have been stressful for my parents. I just remember managing to read all of Pride and Prejudice for the first time because there was nothing else to do.
Also, I know a lot of our neighbours had big problems, snow filled the roads and a thick layer of ice covered everything, and there were people who died of carbon monoxide poisoning due to running generators or camping stoves indoors. Really unsafe but I guess they didn’t think they had a choice.