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Among the tools that the Federal Emergency Management Agency uses informally in the field to monitor hurricanes is the status of waffle houses.
The Georgia-based restaurant chain is proud to have its 1,500 sites open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. This may be due to the fact that most of its outposts are in the south and the Gulf Coast and are therefore vulnerable to hurricanes, tropical storms and floods.
It is precisely for these reasons that it is also a reliable indicator of the destruction trajectory of a storm. In other words, if it's closed, you probably will not want to be in the area.
The index was designed by former FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate. He was not available to comment on Thursday.
"If a waffle house is closed because of a disaster, it's bad," Fugate told NPR in 2016. "We call it red. If they are open but have a limited menu, it is yellow. If the Waffle House is open, everything is fine.
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Waffle House CEO Walter Ehmer, who was in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, spoke Thursday about the CNBC index. "It sounded silly," he said, "but we are actually flattered that they think of us in this regard."
As for Waffle House's Thursday status: "We have teams on the coast and in the evacuation markets," Ehmer said. "Most of our stores are still open.We are lucky that none of our stores involved, which for us exceeds two hundred, none are directly on the beach.Most of them are out of danger … but only a few of them are closed. "
The channel tweeted Tuesday that its storm center had been activated for Florence. We did not know exactly which places were open on Florence.
Waffle House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Alex Edelman / AFP / Getty Images
The company works closely with FEMA as part of the agency's partnerships with private companies. Ehmer wrote about his company's hurricane efforts in 2012.
"We put our leadership on the ground right after the storm to make the decisions needed to know where to send the supplies and the workforce," he wrote in a message on the FEMA website. "Just a few hours after Hurricane Irene's passing, our CEO, two executive vice presidents, an affiliate president, our CFO, and I were on hand to handle the emergency of the lines of forehead."
He continued: "We organized deliveries and sent additional staff to the area, however, it was the field leadership that made the decisions about what was to go – no one in our office at all. Georgia, responding to problems in our restaurants. "
It's not surprising that guests are a role model for forecasters, says Panos Kouvelis, director of the Boeing Center for Supply Chain Innovation at Washington University in St. Louis.
He has studied Waffle House, Walmart, The Home Depot and Loews and uses these companies as case studies of strong supply chain management and risk management strategies that make them particularly agile in storms and disasters. need their products the most.
"Currently, Waffle House is probably studying which restaurants will be affected," Kouvelis told ABC News. "They are trying to pre-position the supplies in relatively safe storage places The priority is" Who are our people? How will this storm affect their lives? "Then you prepare how to move them, you can book hotel rooms so you can sleep near the shops that will be open.
"Why are they good at this? Because they have seen it many times in the past and have learned from it and they have a very good playbook. "
FEMA warned journalists not to take the index too seriously.
"Look, I think it was used at one point," said Alex Amparo of FEMA at a phone briefing. "There is no official use for this, we focus on more empirical data."
But a September FEMA blog post says: "If a Waffle House can serve a full menu, it is likely to be powered (or run with a generator). do not have but there is gas for the stove to produce bacon, eggs and coffee – exactly what tired and tired people need.
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