What to Check
Before you assume the opener itself is shot, work through this in order. First, check the breaker - a tripped GFCI outlet in the garage is the single most common reason an opener goes dead, and cold weather makes nuisance trips more frequent. Second, find the manual release cord (usually a red handle hanging from the trolley) and pull it to disengage the opener from the door; this lets you lift the door by hand during an outage without forcing the motor. Third, if the opener has a battery backup unit, check whether the battery itself has failed - batteries lose capacity faster in cold garages, and a backup that worked last winter can be dead this one. Fourth, listen for the motor humming without the door moving; in a freeze, that's often the drive belt or chain seized against ice buildup rather than a burned-out motor. If none of that explains it and the opener runs but the door won't travel its full range, the issue is more likely the door hardware than the opener - worth ruling out before you replace anything.
The Problem
The core issue in Hugo comes down to timing: houses built across 1950-2002, with the bulk from the 1980s and 90s, mostly have openers that predate battery backup as a standard feature. When a winter storm cuts power - which happens more in a cold-severe climate than a mild one - those openers go completely dark. There's no failover, no capacitor holding a charge, nothing but the manual release. On top of that, cold makes gear-drive and chain-drive units strain harder against a door that's stiffer than usual, since cold steel and cold grease both resist movement. That combination - old opener, no backup, real cold - is why the calls cluster around storms rather than spreading evenly through the year. One limitation worth being honest about: we can add a battery backup unit to most existing openers, but if the opener itself is more than a couple decades old, the motor and circuit board may not be worth building around, and replacement ends up the more sensible call than a bolt-on fix.
