![]() 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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