Serious sign: Waffle House closes locations ahead of Hurricane Milton

TAMPA, Fla. – A southern restaurant chain known for its inexpensive breakfast offerings has earned a reputation as a sanctuary during extreme weather. However, sometimes a weather event is simply too much for individual chains to handle, leading them to shut down to keep employees and patrons safe.

During the run-up to Hurricane Helene in September, several Waffle House locations in the Florida Panhandle around Tallahassee were shut down ahead of the hurricane’s arrival, with similar scenes now occurring in west-central Florida ahead of Milton. 

Hurricane Milton promises to be a major hurricane when it makes landfall around the Tampa metro on Thursday, prompting the shutdown of dozens of locations of the popular restaurant from around New Port Richey southward through Tampa and into the Port Charlotte area.

"Our mission remains to keep our associates out of harm's way," a Waffle House spokesperson told FOX Weather. "Accordingly, in areas predicted to be hardest hit, we will preemptively close restaurants with the goal of reopening them as soon as it is safe to do so, to serve the communities that have been there for us over the years."

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Many of the closed locations are in evacuation zones, where residents have spent the last few days boarding up windows and filling gas tanks before heading generally toward Georgia and southeast Florida. Waffle House posted news about the closures to its social media accounts and received thousands of interactions.

One commenter wrote: "The best part is that Waffle House has ninja teams that, after the emergency is over, will go to the stores with generators, food, equipment, etc., to open them up ASAP." While another said: "The ultimate indicator of whether you should be evacuating or not."

The restaurant chain is so closely associated with weather that members of the Federal Emergency Management Agency developed the "Waffle House Index" as a metric for assessing the severity of weather events. 

The index highlights the severity of impacts, with a code 'green' indicating that a restaurant is offering its full menu and has power. Once a code 'yellow' is reached, a restaurant usually has only a limited menu, and a code 'red' means that a Waffle House is completely closed.

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Georgia Governor Brian Kemp toured Waffle House’s headquarters on Tuesday outside of Atlanta. 

Kemp said he visited what is called the restaurant’s storm center and thanked the team for their work during both Helene and Milton. 

Waffle House did not provide any indications of how long its restaurants may be offline but did say that the potential exists for some of its properties to suffer significant damage.

The privately owned company operates more than 1,900 locations across 25 states, stretching from Ohio to the Florida Keys.