As preparations got underway late this past week throughout the state of Florida in advance of Hurricane Dorian, a small but dedicated team of employees at the Waffle House headquarters just outside Atlanta quietly began gearing up for preparations of their own.

Assemble “jump teams” of operators from Waffle Houses across the Southeast: check.

Send in generators, RVs, and gas to areas with restaurants that will likely be impacted: check.

Make sure maple syrup, sausage biscuit and waffle rations are fully stocked: check, check, and check.

“We try to plan, and our plan gets us up to the storm. Once the storm hits, we really just react,” said Pat Warner, director of public relations and external affairs for Waffle House. “We try to be nimble.”

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Waffle House restaurants are often used to gauge the magnitude of disasters in the Southeast: If a store is open, your community has been spared. If the store is open but has a limited menu, you've likely gotten some damage. If the store is completely closed, you’re in a disaster zone.

State, local and federal governments unofficially use this so-called Waffle House Index as a barometer for how quickly a community is going to recover after a disaster. When Hurricane Michael hit the Florida Panhandle last October, for example, it affected nearly 500 restaurants throughout Florida and Georgia in one way or another. All but three of them — located in the Panama City area, which was among the hardest hit by the storm — were back to full operations within hours or days of the storm.

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After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Waffle House had to close 107 restaurants in the Louisiana and Mississippi area, and some of those stores took years to open back up due to so many employees being displaced. Entire city blocks were leveled, and some stores never opened back up at all. Since then, Waffle House has opened up more than 30 new stores south of Lake Pontchartrain.

“Katrina was by far our biggest disaster,” Warner said. “Most of the restaurants opened up quickly afterwards, and some shut down entirely. It displaced a lot of our associates. Even if we could get the restaurants back up, there was no place for our associates to live. They had no homes. That was a long recovery to get those restaurants back open and get the associates back in the stores, and we’re seeing a little bit of that with Hurricane Michael in the Panama City Beach area.”

Even with Category 5 hurricanes, those types of closures are an exception rather than the rule. Which begs the question: How, exactly, is the chain with nearly 2,000 restaurants in 25 states able to stay open during or after storms when most other establishments close down?

The key is preparation and reputation.

“We have the reputation we’re going to be open quickly. First responders and the National Guard will reach out to us and we’re very happy to open for them,” Warner said. “But the real reason it goes back to is our culture. It’s for our customers. We’re here 24/7/365, so our customers are used to us being there, and we want to get open as quickly as possible after a storm. And more importantly, for our associates. If we’re closed, they’re not making money and we feel like we have a responsibility to be there for them.”

What is the Waffle House Storm Center?

Preparations for the storm typically start days before it’s expected to hit.

At the Waffle House headquarters in Norcross, Georgia, a team of executives will activate the “Waffle House Storm Center” — a conference room in the building that suddenly turns into a military-level operations room filled with company engineers, restaurant operators, food safety experts, meteorologists and more.

“The way we’re structured is our leadership is in the field (wherever the storm is expected to hit). For instance, our senior VP and executive VP over the Florida markets are in Florida right now. That’s where they live anyways, they don’t have an office here in Atlanta,” Warner said. “Our role here (at headquarters) is to feed them with information. We take over the conference room and bring in some monitors and watch the weather, and which restaurants are having higher volumes, and things like that, so we can make sure our resources are in the right places.”

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Waffle House officials have an overlay that allows them to merge a map of their Waffle House locations with a map of a storm’s projected path, to help executives determine where they need to send in reinforcements; which, in a storm like Hurricane Dorian, changes almost every few hours.

Friday afternoon, Waffle House was ready to send in reinforcements to restaurants on Florida’s eastern coast, with Dorian expected to make landfall somewhere between Miami and Melbourne. Saturday morning, however, with the storm’s track shifting east, skirting up the southeastern coastline and potentially making landfall somewhere in the Carolinas, officials were on conference calls with different restaurant operators ready to set up contingency plans wherever needed.

Sunday morning, with the track shifting left ever so slightly again, Florida was back in play. The bottom line: Waffle House has to be prepared for anything.

Ninety-four total restaurants from Florida to North Carolina are currently in danger of having minor to severe damage, according to Warner.

Jump Teams help Waffle House get open and stay open

When any of the stores are in danger of being hit by severe weather, so-called “jump teams” are activated to be ready to deploy wherever needed.

Jump teams are made up of Waffle House contractors, construction workers, gas line experts, restaurant operators, food providers and other associates who are assembled and ready to go wherever needed at a moment’s notice. Their purpose is to help relieve local Waffle House operators and employees who need to evacuate, be with their families or tend to their homes when a storm hits, and help make sure restaurants are able to open quickly after a storm or stay open during a storm.

“Their role is to go in right afterwards and get the restaurants open and get them running,” Warner said. “The great thing about our system is we try to be consistent across the nation. If you know how to run a Waffle House in Mississippi, you can run one in South Carolina, because all the systems are the same.”

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Jeff Camp is the Waffle House area vice president of Southern Middle Tennessee, based in Murfreesboro, about an hour southeast of Nashville, Tennessee. He’s been on eight jump teams, with his first deployment having been to Tuscaloosa, Alabama after a series of deadly tornadoes in 2011.

He was also sent to areas impacted by Hurricanes Florence, Matthew and Irma, as well as other natural disasters in the Southeast. He's on standby for Hurricane Dorian — he was originally prepared to fly into Orlando on Sunday morning to help restaurants in Central Florida, but with the track shifting, he's waiting to see where he and his team need to be sent.

When they parachute in, community members are either preparing for the worst, or are already dealing with its devastation — loss of loved ones, loss of homes and schools, the loss of complete normalcy. Many places have no running water or are on boil water advisories, some places have no electricity other than the glean of the fluorescent Waffle House lights.

“Most people are living on bottled water and canned food that isn’t able to even be cooked. They’re living off beans out of a can,” he said. “They’re so grateful to have someone there to cook them a hot meal and serve them a cold drink, and in those situations, we try to get our generators in there as quickly as possible so people have a place to come in and sit down. It’s almost like they come in to escape what’s going on around them.”

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Camp recalls going to Savannah, Georgia right after Hurricane Matthew in October 2016. He took a server with him from Murfreesboro, Tennessee and she worked at a Savannah restaurant from 7 a.m. until almost midnight to help relieve some of the other employees.

When Camp came back to the restaurant to pick her up at midnight, he saw her counting her tip money on the table. Before she left, instead of putting it in her pocket, she gave it to the three other servers she had been working with that day.

“She said, ‘I have bills to pay too, but I have nothing going on like they do. My roof is over my head, my kids are safe, life is good back at home, and I just couldn’t walk away and take that money,’” Camp said.

It's one of the reasons getting the restaurants back open are so important — people need jobs even amid the devastation.

But it's also about normalcy.

“It’s special to be able to do it for the first responders, and that’s part of why we really want to stay open, is for them,” Camp added. “But it’s also about the community. Some of my greatest memories are how appreciative these people are to sit down and get a hot meal or a cup of coffee. It’s a great sense of accomplishment to get stores back open and see the community come in and start getting their lives back to normal.”

An open Waffle House: "It's like the sunrise after the storm"

The resiliency of Waffle House restaurants and the effectiveness of their storm preparations have caught the attention of local and federal government officials before.

Though officials stress the Waffle House Index is an unofficial metric used to judge a storm’s impact, it has consistently been known as an effective marker of how badly a community has been hit.

Warner says the index began in 2004, when Craig Fugate was the director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management.

“In 2004 Florida had four hurricanes, it was hit pretty hard. He (Fugate) would tell his team to drive to an affected area and if a Waffle House was open, keep driving. If a Waffle House had a limited menu, keep driving but keep your eyes out. If a Waffle House was closed, that was where the worst of the damage was,” Warner said. “It was an unofficial way to see the impact of the storm on the community.”

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Daniel Hahn is the director of safety for the Santa Rosa County School District in the Florida Panhandle, and was the Plans Section Chief for Santa Rosa County Emergency Management from 2006 to 2018. He also currently serves on the Region 1 Incident Management team, a state program that aids local counties in times of disasters.

Throughout his time in emergency management, he found Waffle House restaurants as both a barometer of economic recovery and a symbol of hope during times of disaster.

“If a Waffle House is closed and those doors aren’t opening, you know your community has been walloped,” Hahn said.

Executives from Waffle House came to meet with Hahn and other Santa Rosa and Escambia County emergency management officials in 2012 to discuss safety plans and storm operations.

“They sat down with us and went over their plans,” he said. “They’ve got very good regional plans for sustaining operations, no matter where they are in the United States. Emergency managers know, as a rule, that the Waffle House Index is a generalization and an informal tool, but they do certainly use it as a gauge, because they (Waffle House) have got such a great recovery plan.”

Hahn has been deployed to other parts of the state several times in his emergency response capacity, most recently to Pasco County for Hurricane Irma in 2017. The county had braced for disaster but was spared the worst of the storm’s wrath.

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When Hahn and other emergency officials and first responders went looking for food, the bright yellow Waffle House sign with its signature black block lettering stood like a beacon of hope.

“The Waffle House was open with a limited menu and long lines,” he said. “It was just a feeling of comfort knowing that Pasco County did not get crushed like they thought they were going to. I kind of giggled, ‘cause the Waffle House index clearly works.”

Warner said keeping restaurants open or getting them back open after a storm is like “throwing chaos at chaos,” but it’s a system they’ve honed and are constantly tweaking with each passing storm. And they've translated their storm preparations to other areas of operations as well. When Atlanta hosted the Super Bowl earlier this year, for example, Waffle House sent in jump teams to help their Atlanta stores with the large influx of visitors.

Plus, having so many locations concentrated throughout the southeast (the state with the highest number of Waffle Houses is Georgia) means the chain is constantly in storm prep or reaction mode.

“We understand the reputation that we’ve built through the years, and we’re really flattered by that,” Warner said. “But it is funny, because a lot of times the state or federal government will tell people to get ready for the storm, but once they see us and other companies closing, I think that really drives the point home to a lot of people.”

In the emergency management world, having businesses that are able to open quickly after storms is important for the community to get back to normal. Businesses up and running allows officials to clear shelters, and if they can clear shelters, they can get schools back open, which prompts more businesses to open and families to return home.

But to people like Hahn, a Waffle House opening its doors after a storm, cooking up plates of smothered hash browns and buttery waffles, is more than just a symbol of economic recovery.

“It means the community has hope,” he said. “It means that the power is most likely on in that particular area, it means you have a place to eat, which is always good for first responders and locals. It means things might actually be all right. It’s like the sunrise after the storm.”

Annie Blanks can be reached at ablanks@pnj.com or 850-435-8632.