Most of them had generators being out in the boonies, but most ran out of fuel for them on day 2 or 3.
I have a 6KW John Deere gas generator which I have to manually back-feed the house through a 220V 30A outlet. Sits in the garage and I plumbed the exhaust to outside and with a vent fant. Amazingly, I can mostly power the whole house, including HVAC in AC, if I am careful to run other things one at a time. But it is terribly loud and hot, plus too scared to run it while sleeping. I bought it many years ago, days before a hurricane that ended up leaving us without power for a week. It was a life-safer.
Anyway, it holds about 8 gal of gas, and I have maybe 10 gal of stored fuel (even with Stabil, gas lasts only so long , plus I don't have much space). That thing sucks gas pretty quickly, I believe around 1/2 gal per hour. So yeah, it would only last me a few days if I could not get additional gas. We were lucky that some gas stations were still open.
A better solution would be a 10KW natural gas one sitting outside with auto-transfer. But when I looked into that, companies wanted something like $12,000! I check around every several years, and the price is always the same... even though I think the hardware is around $4,000.... I have a concrete pad next to the garage and it sits right next to the gas meter and electric meter, with the main panel on the other side of the wall. $8,000 of labor for maybe 6 hours of work???