Ice storm in Montreal, Canada about 15 years ago.
Many went without power till Spring.
We are in an outlying area. Our power has been out for weeks after ice storms and wind storms. There is no one in our neighborhood who doesn't have at least one generator. Many of them are hooked up to come on automatically.
We have a backup for our primary generator that we have never used. Fortunately we have natural gas that is hardly ever interrupted so the generators are not as much of an inconvenience as one might think. We just have to check the oil at least once a day. We have a little 2 stroke generator if all else fails and also some big power inverters we can hook up to the vehicles as a last resort.