BSR,
I can't comment about what you've experienced in your locale, but I went through Irene, followed by the October storm the same year, with Sandy the year following. We only lost power for the better part of a week during the October storm, and a day or two during Sandy, but picture your house being in the 40's without heat....refrigerator useless and no running water (or only cold) and no fuel or ice available for miles or an hour+ drive. Supermarkets were closed and same went for many restaurants for miles around....then picture attempting to work or take care of kids in this sort of circumstance.
Reality check aside, when Sandy blew through here there were multiple CS' in the area that were affected (or under water) which is entirely another issue.....but what happened at least a half dozen times in my state was HO's brought generators close to their house/garage/basement (because they were being stolen) and were backfeeding their breaker boxes through either a welder outlet or dryer outlet to get some sort of power....people went without power just the year before for days, weeks or almost a month. You wouldn't believe attempting to buy a NEMA plug or cheater cord, let alone the raw materials to build one....the cable wasn't even available to get the generators far enough away from the house, or people were stealing them.
I had customers whose systems detected CO, temperature problems and also flood/high water (sump monitoring, etc and others that were moving the generator between running a few hours to try to keep a fridge/freezer cold enough so the food wouldn't spoil and a power a few critical items in their house (charge cell phones, charge a panel battery up, etc.)
A few families in my state died from CO poisoning, others caught their house on fire from candles, fires that got out of hand, whatever. Personally, I'd want those sorts of signals to be able to get out to an appropriate responder wherever possible.
