WAFFLE HOUSE INDEX DRIVERS

'Businesses in communities are often some of the biggest drivers of recovery. The agency said last year that it provided 'information such as where emergency supplies where being moved and which retail stores could be affected by the storm' to local businesses before Hurricane Irene. While Waffle House might be the agency's most well-known partner, FEMA said in 2017 that it has similar relationships with a variety of other private-sector partners like Target, Walmart, Wegmans, Macy's, Walgreens, Lowes and Safeway.īefore a storm hits, FEMA works with businesses in a storm's path as they develop their own relief plans. 'Our planning gets us ready for the storm and so once it has passed our managers can see what's going on in the area and respond right after an emergency.' 'There is logistics planning in staging and getting additional supplies and manpower into an affected area right after a storm, however it's our show up that sets us apart from other companies,' Waffle House CEO Walt Ehmer wrote in a FEMA blog post about the company's response to Hurricane Irene. How a business like Waffle House, which boasts its own storm center that it activates when necessary, plans for a natural disaster is not that different from how a government agency would plan for the same event.

They'll make coffee with bottled water.'įugate, who helmed FEMA for eight years, is known for his Waffle House Matrix that has been used internally to gauge how the restaurants are faring: stores that are open and offering a full menu are green, stores that are open and serving a limited menu are yellow, and stores that are closed are red.

WAFFLE HOUSE INDEX GENERATOR

They have procedures that if they can get a generator in there, they'll get going. It don't matter if they don't have power, it don't matter if you don't have gas. 'They have a corporate philosophy that if there is a hurricane or a storm, they try and get their stores open. They run 24 hours a day,' then-FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate told the New York Times in 2012. Boss did reiterate that the Waffle House Index doesn’t actually belong to Waffle House, but they appreciate their name being used. 'Waffle House has a very simple operational philosophy: get open. The Waffle House Index sits alongside more formal measures of wind, rainfall, and other weather information, such as the SaffirSimpson Hurricane Wind Scale, which are used to indicate the intensity of a storm.

Waffle house index