Do This the Night the Power Goes Out in Winter — Not the Oven, Not the Candles, Not the Grill

My name is Wade Corbin. My house is the last one on the line. The power goes out about ten times a winter out here, the nearest hardware store is forty minutes, and nobody is coming to sort it out for me. It is January, the second night with no power, and you can see your breath in the kitchen. This is the moment people do one of three things: turn on the gas oven, light every candle in the house, or bring the camp stove or the grill in from the garage. Every one of those is how people end up in the paper the next morning. So here is what I do instead. I do not try to heat the house. I heat the bed — with a tent. In this video I go through the three things the emergency agencies say never to do, in their own words — FEMA on the oven and the grill, the CDC on carbon monoxide and the people who never wake up, and the Fire Administration on candles. Then where the heat actually comes from when nothing burns: you. FEMA's own advice is to close off unused rooms, block drafts with towels and tuck in multiple blankets to trap heat. I take that one step further. The smallest room, everyone in it, the door shut and a towel along the bottom. A small dome tent pitched on the bed. Sleeping bags, coats, a hat to bed, everything tucked in. And nothing inside that tent that burns or heats — a flashlight, never a candle. Then the part that matters most for people my age: why older bodies make less heat and notice the cold later, the CDC's warning signs of hypothermia, when a tent is no longer enough, and why you should find your warming centre now, in October, while the phone works. Go and put the tent up indoors this weekend, once, so you know how it goes together in the dark. Then tell me in the comments the longest your power has ever been out. Just the number of days. I read every one of them. Subscribe so you do not miss the next one. Stay warm. Stay dry. And remember, the people who had to work these things out for themselves usually got closer to the truth than the people selling you the answer. #PowerOutage #WinterPrep #StayWarm #EmergencyPrep #CarbonMonoxide #RuralLiving #SelfReliance #Homestead #NoElectricity #WinterStorm #ThingsThatWork #Seniors