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The waffle house5/1/2023 ![]() īut the so-called index isn’t actually an official metric. ![]() The concept of restaurant operations as an indicator of storm impact percolated slowly into emergency-management culture - the magazine Environment Health Safety Today wrote about it in July 2011 - and broke out into the open around the time of Hurricane Irene in August 2011 (when, according to The Wall Street Journal, 22 Waffle Houses lost power but only one stayed closed longer than a day). Fugate has since been quoted as saying: “If you get there and the Waffle House is closed? That’s really bad. And, second, to use those observations as a proxy for how much a disaster disrupts a community. “Which is pretty bad, because Waffle House is always open,” Lopez added. So, she said, the group was inspired first to rank Waffle Houses in the same way: green for fully operational, yellow for a limited menu and red for closed. “The next day, they were driving around and they went to a different Waffle House, and the same thing happened, a limited menu.” “They went to a Waffle House and noticed they had a limited menu, with nonperishable items,” Alexa Lopez, FEMA’s press secretary, told me. Tens of thousands of people were reportedly left homeless.įugate was in his office with state meteorologist Ben Nelson and members of the Florida National Guard, color-coding infrastructure loss on a map - green for operating, yellow for affected, and red for destroyed - and the group decided to take a look at some of the damage, and try to find a meal. Fugate was director of emergency management for Florida when Charley slammed the state with unexpected force: Its winds strengthened abruptly and it went from a Category 2 to a Category 4, and the storm suddenly changed direction and struck the state’s Gulf Coast at Sanibel, 150 miles south of its predicted landfall. Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency since 2009. In those areas, the Waffle House Index had just gone to red.ĭisaster responders pay attention to that index, which was created - in the midst of 2004’s devastating Hurricane Charley - by W. The Miami Herald: “When Waffle House surrenders to a hurricane, you know it’s bad.” The Washington Post: “Hurricane Matthew is so scary even the always-open eatery is evacuating.” A faithful customer on Twitter: “GOD IN HEAVEN THIS IS THE END!” (In the next few days, as the storm churned up the coast and flooded North Carolina, it would close 98 all told.) And as soon as the announcement went out, media tracking the storm, and customers on social media, invoked the closings as a sign of the apocalypse. 6 that it was pre-emptively closing some restaurants on a 90-mile stretch of Interstate 95 between Fort Pierce and Titusville in Florida. And second, sometime after they did, someone would invoke the “Waffle House Index,” the slightly flippant measure of how bad a storm can get.Īnd Matthew brought on both those expected scenarios. First, as the storm made landfall, some locations of Waffle House - which boasts that every restaurant stays open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year - would probably have to close because of power loss or concerns for workers’ safety. Hundreds of miles inland, in the headquarters of Waffle House Inc., Stark’s software predicted that 477 of the chain’s almost 1,900 restaurants might be affected by the onrushing storm. Out in the Atlantic Ocean, Hurricane Matthew was hurling winds of 115 miles an hour toward the coast of Florida. On a warm, cloudy morning in the first week of October, in an anonymous office park just outside Atlanta, operations analyst Matt Stark opened a computer program, ran through some data and looked thoughtfully at the results.
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