A couple of winters ago we had an extended power outage in the Seattle area. I was amazed at the number of deaths and people rushed to the hospital due to carbon monoxide poisoning from barbecues being brought inside houses or electric generators being placed inside garages. A number of barbecue related cases involved recent immigrants from warmer locales where houses aren't air tight. My house was without power for 6 days and the temperature got down to about 40 inside so I can't even imagine the number of additional carbon monoxide poisonings if we had a power outage up here during "real" winter weather.