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:

When a hurricane makes landfall, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency relies on a couple of metrics to assess its destructive power.

First, there is the well-known Saffir-Simpson Wind Scale. Then there is what he calls the “Waffle House Index.”

Green means the restaurant is serving a full menu, a signal that damage in an area is limited and the lights are on. Yellow means a limited menu, indicating power from a generator, at best, and low food supplies. Red means the restaurant is closed, a sign of severe damage in the area or unsafe conditions.

via Waffle House Index Measures Hurricane Recovery – WSJ.com.

Panos Kouvelis is the Emerson Distinguished Professor of Operations and Manufacturing Management at Olin Business School and has written about the The ‘Waffle House’ Emergency Level Index:

Both Home Depot and Waffle House are world-class examples in their Disaster Management and Humanitarian Response Planning Approaches. The challenges they face are many: predicting customer demand after a disaster event; providing product required to the affected stores in an accurate and timely manner; establishing appropriate and ethical prices for their products; and maintaining adequate work-force levels after the event. The philosophy of both companies in such situations is more or less the same: getting back into the affected areas, opening stores as quickly as possible, and helping the local economy to rebuild.

As the former Waffle House Restaurants CEO, Bert Thorton, said after a hurricane: “Nothing good can come from a closed Waffle House after a hurricane—not for us, not for the community, not for the associates.” As customers, we couldn’t agree more, and we are grateful for it. We will accept that we cannot get our order of an “over-medium plate scattered, smothered, covered, chunked, diced, topped, peppered, and capped” in their limited menu after the tornado, and we will acknowledge their priceless service of hot meals to law enforcement, emergency responders, and anxious locals.