> I've lived in a few states, in a few rural areas and sometimes storms would knock power lines down for a handful of days. I don't remember any 7 day stretches, but 2-4 days was not uncommon.
A derecho[0] hit in my area (eastern Iowa) in August of 2020. This is an urban & suburban area with fairly reliable power—even short outages are rare, and I can't think of any instances where power was out more than a few hours—but after that storm there were dozens of miles of high-voltage power lines in need of complete replacement, along with supporting structures in some cases, as well as issues with generators and substations. My own home was without power for at least four days and some of my friends didn't get their power back for almost two weeks.
I used my vehicle's 1kW alternator as a generator for the first two days to run a portable 12V refrigerator and to recharge devices & battery packs in combination with a 200W inverter. It used surprisingly little fuel, perhaps 1/3 gallon per hour at most, and it was quieter and had better-filtered exhaust than the portable generators some of my neighbors were using, though of course it wouldn't be able to handle higher-power appliances like residential refrigerators or A/C. After that I took an impromptu trip out of the affected area until the power was restored—we never actually reached a point where one couldn't find gasoline for vehicles or generators, but there were long lines are all the local gas stations and I didn't want to risk it when there was another choice.
A derecho[0] hit in my area (eastern Iowa) in August of 2020. This is an urban & suburban area with fairly reliable power—even short outages are rare, and I can't think of any instances where power was out more than a few hours—but after that storm there were dozens of miles of high-voltage power lines in need of complete replacement, along with supporting structures in some cases, as well as issues with generators and substations. My own home was without power for at least four days and some of my friends didn't get their power back for almost two weeks.
I used my vehicle's 1kW alternator as a generator for the first two days to run a portable 12V refrigerator and to recharge devices & battery packs in combination with a 200W inverter. It used surprisingly little fuel, perhaps 1/3 gallon per hour at most, and it was quieter and had better-filtered exhaust than the portable generators some of my neighbors were using, though of course it wouldn't be able to handle higher-power appliances like residential refrigerators or A/C. After that I took an impromptu trip out of the affected area until the power was restored—we never actually reached a point where one couldn't find gasoline for vehicles or generators, but there were long lines are all the local gas stations and I didn't want to risk it when there was another choice.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_2020_Midwest_derecho