About

The Waffle House Index is an informal metric used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to determine the effect of a disaster based on the number of open Waffle House restaurants. Coined by former FEMA director Craig Fugate, the scale follows an informal rule that, as Fugate stated, "If you get there and the Waffle House is closed? That's really bad."

Origin

In August 2004 following Hurricane Charley in Florida, Craig Fugate who was leading Florida’s Division of Emergency Management at the time, along with Tad Warfel and Ben Nelson, devised the scale based on the status of Waffle House restaurants still open in areas that have been hit by a disaster.^[10] The chain has a reputation for remaining open 24-hours a day even during extreme weather, occasionally operating with a limited menu, and thus served as a useful indicator of how a community was recovering in the aftermath of a disaster.

The index was based on three color-coded levels:

GREEN: full menu – restaurant has power and damage is limited or no damage at all.
YELLOW: limited menu – no power or only power from a generator, or food supplies may be low.
RED: the restaurant is closed – indicating severe damage or severe flooding.

Craig Fugate then became FEMA Administrator in 2009, bringing this informal index with him to FEMA as a method to quickly evaluate the impact of a disaster and to determine the level of attention disaster areas immediately require.

Spread

In May 2011, following the Joplin tornado, press outlets quoted Fugate's discussion of the scale based on the two Waffle House restaurants still open.^[1][2]

Over the next few years, the Waffle House Index became the subject of public interest, inspiring news reports and studies. For example on December 4th, 2012, HLN published a report about the Index on YouTube (shown below).

Other outlets, including Business Insider and Fox News also published reports on the Index in the following years (examples below, left and right).

On December 6th, 2016, FiveThirtyEight^[3] published a report on the Waffle House Index.

They wrote:

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. And second, sometime after they did, someone would invoke the “Waffle House Index,” the slightly flippant measure of how bad a storm can get.

And Matthew brought on both those expected scenarios. Waffle House announced Oct. 6 that it was pre-emptively closing some restaurants on a 90-mile stretch of Interstate 95 between Fort Pierce and Titusville in Florida. (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.

The Index has inspired conversation on various websites, including Reddit. The topic has been discussed on various subreddits such as /r/todayilearned, ^[5][6] /r/circlejerk^[7] and /r/wallstreetbets.^[8]

Waffle House has also acknowledged the Index. On March 25th, 2020, for example, during the coronavirus outbreak they posted on Facebook, ^[4] "#WaffleHouseIndexRed: 418 Waffle House restaurants closed. 1,574 open." The post received more than 1,000 shares, 635 reactions and 200 comments in less than 24 hours (shown below).

That day, following Waffle House's decision to close 365 locations across the U.S., geophysicist and disaster researcher Mika McKinnon tweeted,^[9] "The Waffle House Index is an informal measure of disaster severity. Waffle House has incredible resiliency plans including limited menus to maintain minimal operation. So for them to close? Like, actually close? That’s a Big Deal." The tweet received more than 16,000 likes and 5,900 retweets in less than 24 hours (shown below, left). Others shared the sentiment on Twitter (examples below, center and right).

Search Interest

External References