When the furnace dies in a winter blackout, the heat you reach for can burn your house down or poison your family in their sleep.

The winter calls I still think about were the quiet houses.

My name is Frank Russo. I joined a city fire department in 1987 and retired as a captain in 2018. For my last twelve years I ran an engine company in an old part of the city, row houses full of space heaters and extension cords, and every winter brought the same calls.

The power goes out. The furnace still has gas but no electricity for the blower and the igniter, so the house gets colder by the hour. Somebody opens the oven door and lights the burners. Somebody carries the charcoal grill in from the porch, or runs the generator in the garage with the door cracked. A space heater goes on an extension cord next to the bed. Then the whole family lies down with a headache.

Carbon monoxide has no color, no smell and no taste. It feels like the flu, then like sleep. I have carried people out of houses where nothing was burning. The CDC counts more than 400 accidental carbon monoxide deaths in this country every year, with the worst of it in winter, and space heaters are behind most of the deaths from home heating fires.

Every one of those families was trying to keep warm. It has happened in living memory:

• February 2021, Texas.Families ran cars, grills and generators indoors, and carbon monoxide poisonings came in the hundreds.
• December 2022, Buffalo.A blizzard buried the city with homes cold and dark.
• January 1998.The ice storm across the Northeast and Canada brought down lines for days and weeks.
• August 2003.The Northeast blackout put tens of millions in the dark in one afternoon.

The next long outage will come on a cold night, and you will be deciding in the dark what is safe to light. Every winter you go in without a plan, your family's safety rests on a guess made by someone cold and tired. Make that decision now, in daylight, with the book open.

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Warm Without Power: A Fire Captain's Plan to Keep Your Family Warm and Safe When the Power Goes Out in Winter

Frank Russo, Retired Fire Captain · 160-page book · reads on any phone, tablet or computer

• Why your gas furnace quits when the power does, and what in your house keeps working
• The first hour: the flashlight, the breaker panel, the alarms and the heaters to switch off
• The first 72 hours in order, night one to day three, and the signs it's time to leave
• Carbon monoxide: the symptoms, the alarms, and the list of things that never come inside
• Space heaters, cords and outlets: the three-foot rule and the bedtime walk
• Fuel heaters and wood stoves run safely, the way the maker and a fire captain say
• Generators and battery power without poisoning anyone or backfeeding the line
• The one warm room: picked, sealed, the bed made warm, and no flame in it
• Pipes, water, food and light through a winter outage
• The kitchen-wall card and every checklist, ready to print

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30-day money-back guarantee.Read it, walk your house with the checklists, set up your warm room. If it isn't worth $27 to you, ask for your money back within 30 days and you get it.