Thursday, October 6, 2016

Major Hurricane Alert: Waffle House Closing Interstate-95 Restaurants, Foreshadowing The Highest Level on FEMA's Waffle House Index

As one commenter said: "Things just got real".
From Waffle House:

And from Wikipedia:

Waffle House Index
The Waffle House Index is an informal metric used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to determine the impact of a storm and the likely scale of assistance required for disaster recovery.

The measure is based on the reputation of the Waffle House restaurant chain for staying open during extreme weather and for reopening quickly, albeit sometimes with a limited menu, after very severe weather events such as tornadoes or hurricanes. The term was coined by FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate in May 2011, following the 2011 Joplin tornado; the two Waffle House restaurants in Joplin remained open after the EF5 multiple-vortex tornado struck the city on May 22.[1][2]

According to Fugate, "If you get there and the Waffle House is closed? That’s really bad. That’s where you go to work."[3]

The Index has three levels, based on the extent of operations and service at the restaurant following a storm:[3][4]
  • Green: the restaurant is serving a full menu, indicating the restaurant has power and damage is limited.
  • Yellow: the restaurant is serving a limited menu, indicating there may be no power or only power from a generator or food supplies may be low.
  • Red: the restaurant is closed, indicating severe damage....
...MORE

See also "Waffle House Restaurants hurricane response: A case study"  at the International Journal of Production Economics, July, 2010.
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