I was a professional firefighter for 25 years and have all sorts of "dumb A$$" stories as well. The only one that vaguely resembles a power outage story is when the crews at my fire station had gone to two burned and electrocuted guys the night before located under high voltage transmission lines, along with a ladder and assortment and tools. For some reason the two believed that the lines were not hot, and they would be able to steal the copper wire if they could get it down.
A few months later my wife and I came upon a similar operation while were riding one of our tandem bicycles at night on a bike path that parallelled a set of transmission lines. These were actually on large metal towers. We came upon a "crew" who were all wearing yellow vests and wearing hard hats which I think were meant to be a disguise. They had a bunch of bicycles and big wagons with rotating spools that they were winding the wire onto. Fortunately, these lines actually were turned off. As we rode through them, they became very quiet and were watching us closely. I realized immediately that this was not a legitimate operation.
My wife and I rode about half a mile further up the bike path and called the police. The first policemen who met us at a parking area a little further up the trail had bicycles that were kept in their police vehicles. They stopped to talk to us first before approaching the criminal operation. I worked in a different municipality, but they were aware of our fairly recent fatalities.
This group actually turned out to be an organized copper theft ring who had managed to figure out that these transmission lines were no longer being used. The lines and the bike path went through an industrial area. Who would have guessed that the lines were not being used at that time? We didn't stay to watch all the fun, but a lot of police showed up as quietly as they could, and I believe that they managed to apprehend the entire bunch.
At that time the price of copper had gone from around $.65 a pound to nearly $4 a pound in the previous couple of years. This caused the number of copper thieves to explode. Drug addicts everywhere found a new source of income. It has become a national problem but our area was at the leading edge. New laws were passed to try and curb this activity but many years later it is still a problem.
I am not sure why there is a discrepancy between what you are being told by your friends and my firsthand experiences. It is likely the opposite of what one might expect. The level of stupidity where I am at is probably so much greater that the stories of a few people doing stupid things during a power outage, just become lost in the tidal wave of stupidity that takes place in our area. I don't know...
I was a leader on our hazmat team, so I was responsible for helping to coordinate classes put on by outside agencies and groups such as utilities, the military, railroads and others. So, I am not unfamiliar with the hazards caused by people who hook their generators up to their house wiring and do not take precautions to make sure that they are not feeding back into the power grid.
It is possible that this can create a hazard for linemen, but it is unusual for a portable generator to not immediately trip its own internal protection when this is done. If it didn't you would be providing power to your own home and the surrounding area which most small generators are not capable of doing. If the generator is hooked up to live wires connected to the grid it also should trip the generator's own protection circuit immediately. So, the question has been raised at various classes that I have been at... how much of a problem that this really causes in real life.
And there have been linemen killed by voltage being back fed into the grid. This is extremely rare and there typically has to be very specific set of circumstances that can cause this. From what we were told real culprits tend to be solar systems with battery backups and standby generators which automatically cycle on and off when the power goes out because they are defective or were improperly installed usually by "professionals" but sometimes by homeowners.
These systems tend to be fairly complicated and can be difficult to troubleshoot when they malfunction. They will cycle on and off when there is something wrong with them and a wire that was safe a moment before suddenly is capable of killing or injuring someone. The utility's own equipment is more often to blame for this type of hazard, but if proper precautions by the crew have been taken this typically can be mitigated. But a malfunctioning backup system from a home or business back feeding into the grid can be less predictable and thus more dangerous.
And I agree that carbon monoxide can be a killer which is why my wife, and I have several CO detectors in our multi-story home. I feel like the stories that your buddies have told you have caused your assessment of risk to be somewhat skewed. I am sure New Hampshire is a beautiful place to live as are the foothills in the Cascades. But there is a price to be paid. The trees that are all around our home were planted by the Weyerhaeuser company and meant to be harvested after about 30 or 40 years. They are fast growing and when they get too tall their root systems do not hold up well against strong easterly winds that happen here because of our unique topography. I have cut down about 30 of them (I had to climb and section about half of them.) over the years after they have gotten too tall. (anything over 120 feet can be a real problem) In our last big storm two of our neighbors' trees barely missed our house and the power and internet was out for a week. Sorry for the long post. I worked for a long time in a family lumber reman plant turning rough wood into finished products, so your pseudonym woodbutcher always brings back memories.
There were three young ladies from a suburb of Boston killed in Belize on vacation a few weeks ago. At first they thought they died of drug overdoses. After the autopsies it was determined they died from Carbon Monoxide poisoning from a water heater in the hotel they were staying.