In a gas oven you can cook a turkey for five, six hours, and the oven is not vented to the outside. But run your gas furnace for any time at all without a vent and somebody is gonna die. Huh?
A gas range typically uses 10,000-15,000 BTUs of energy per hour. Most houses are sufficiently leaky that ample fresh oxygen can be drawn from outside to replace what’s lost to combustion. Not so with a furnace, which can use 100,000 BTUs or more. If the furnace isn’t vented or the vent is blocked, the oxygen supply is quickly depleted, resulting in lots of carbon monoxide and a bunch of asphyxiated folks.
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A proper draft is so strong that the chimney need not be sealed at the point where it exits the furnace in order to do the righteous work of exhaust-gas removal. Often, in fact, there is an opening or gap of some kind. Don’t worry, it’s so fresh air can be pulled in, not so toxic gas can get out. As long as the toxic gas can escape, there isn’t any toxic gas. It’s only when it can’t that there is.
For complex geophysical reasons having to do with the rotation of the earth, the tropical winds in the hurricane-spawning region south of the Bermuda high basically blow west. Once a hurricane gets up to speed, it may continue due west across Central America and out to the Pacific. More commonly, it may circle around the Bermuda high, first northwest and then north. Later, after having leveled or at least threatened various points of interest on the eastern seaboard, the hurricane or what’s left of it heels over to the northeast and east and back out to sea.
