In Pittsburgh after the blizzard, we all slept in the family/living room where the fireplace was, in sleeping bags. I think power was out for a week to 10 days?

You don't need to heat an entire house to stay alive. Just enough so the people sitting next to the fire don't die of hypothermia

Sure. So enough wood to keep that room warm 12 hours a day for a month suddenly became enough wood to keep that room warm 24 hours a day for two weeks. The family that happened to put in a months supply two weeks before the storm started only had enough for one week of full time fires, and that ran out days ago. (The suburban european houses with a fireplace I know are more likely to burn it a few hours each day, which makes their month of wood worth only a few days of full reliance).

You don't need large fires to heat a home. All wood burning furnaces I've used are smaller than a cubic meter.