This article is a bit painful to read. It should be lessons from living in the remote wildnerness in winter. Pretty much all those problems are relative to rural infrastructure and poor home building. If you live in an area with heavy snow load you want an A-frame roof to de-load the roof (for example see: Tahoe, CA ~ 500-800" snow a year).

Most Tahoe buildings are not A-frames, 500-800" snow years are big years, not average, and also those are resort numbers, not towns where more houses are. Modern buildings in Tahoe are engineered to hold very high snow loads, typically have a lot of snow on the roof, you need to do snow removal as needed.

I live in Mammoth where the town is significantly snowier than say Truckee or lake level Tahoe. The grocery store is open and operating normally no matter how snowy it is. Including the 22/23 winter when 695" fell in town. Lots of buildings did collapse that year though and snow removal was a constant struggle.

But A-frames or other very angled roofs are not typical here, roofs have to handle 300 lbs/sq foot, and there are requirements for where a roof is allowed to shed to. Typically they will angle in one direction to control where shedding happens. Keeping the snow on the roof also provides insulation, in a typical snow year we may do basically no removal and just have a blanket of snow on the roof the whole winter.

This isn't fully true.

Snow can be bad enough to a point where even modern cement build building can have trouble.

EDIT: I didn't realize A-frame refers to a _very_ steep angle instead of "just" a slightly steeply tilted roof.

And A-frame roof help but do _not_ magically fix it, with the right kind of snow condition it can get stuck to the roof anyway and turn into ice there. This can be dangerous in 2 ways. 1. Weight and 2. if it randomly comes all crashing down potentially hitting people. And sure it's should be a rare exception if you have stable build buildings. But rare exceptions happens anyway even in places with good infrastructure and/or cities etc.

Similar while power outages really should not happen, sometimes there are natural catastrophes (or terrorist attacks) and power is gone for days anyway.

Being prepared helps. Even if it's a situation which counts as natural disaster and external help will be provided, knowing that you aren't reliant on it and they can focus on people much more in need is nice.

PS: I'm not a preper or anything, just prepared in the sense of basic knowledge and some minimal preparations like flash lights, water, food you can eat without stove, a larger battery, somewhat weather proof clothes, etc. Nothing fancy, nothing usable long term. Just enough to bridge some days of an local emergency situation.

You'll even find ubiquitous A-frames in Southern California in mountain ranges. Crestline, Arrowhead, Big Bear, etc.

A-frame houses are not efficient in terms of space inside and thermal properties (both because of low volume to surface ratio). It's sufficient to have 40-45° root pitch to avoid snow accumulation.