'Waffle House Index' is a real thing during disasters

Round numbers? Something approximating zero...

In all seriousness, I actually sat down and read the FEMA recommendations on things to keep on hand. It's surprisingly thorough and surprisingly difficult to keep all of it in stock, rotated so that it doesn't spoil and checked on on a regular basis. Growing up, my mom was an avid coupon shopper, not necessarily because we needed it, just because she could. That meant that we had a pantry that sorta, kinda resembled an edible version of a prepper -- no MREs, but enough commercial and home canned food to last several months without any rationing even without power. Dad also kept a 200 gallon gas tank due to bad memories of the fuel rationing and prices in the '70's. We were as prepared as you could reasonably expect, but we were still not as prepared as FEMA recommended in many ways. These days, in relatively expensive town, in a relatively small house, I cannot possibly keep everything on hand that FEMA recommends, even on the light kit for a few weeks, but I at least make a passing attempt.

You can see those recommendations at https://www.ready.gov/

Seems to me the organization is decentralized, but the CCC is centralized. Sounds military-esque, until you realize that in book "Team of Teams" General McChrystal makes a case of decentralized bottom up faster acting organizations.

Presumably they're volunteers and get compensated for it? Some people enjoy that kind of challenge and thrive from helping people and communities.

Ericsson has a similar response program in place for disasters around the world. They call it "Ericsson Response".

The goal is to setup GSM-based emergency networks from scratch very quickly in severe disaster areas where infrastructure is disrupted by natural or other kinds of disasters.

For example: Nepal after the devastating earthquake in 2015.

They're flying in containers of GSM network equipment, diesel generators, fuel, along with technical people to get things going. Then they'll hand out SIMs/phones to emergency workers ASAP in order to empower logistics in a disaster zone.

It's manned by (obviously still paid) volunteers out of their normal working force.

This is based from Sweden mostly, I think. I'd expect the usual foreign travel insurance thing, perhaps with an additional hostage negotiation insurance for particular regions.

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Presumably neither of these would be needed for Waffle House employees from the US who travel to another US state?

For well-run companies these kinds of things are a win-win thing. The company gets more loyalty, the employees get more motivation and the "end-users" get help. Perhaps the Waffle House is just a well-run company?

That is an exceedingly cynical way of looking at it. People usually volunteer to do this kind of thing and have no small amount of personal pride that they are able to help their neighbors in a disaster. It is a very positive experience for the people that do it, and they are often some of the first people on the ground. This is a manifestation of the self-reliance bias of American culture, they want to fix things themselves when disasters happen.

Disaster response in the US is completely driven by these kinds of community-oriented actions by private individuals and companies, and it has a long history of being highly effective.

If it's _actually_ run by employees who volunteer that'd be cool, but my personal experience of service industry work is that you are are volunteered to do something or you are volunteered to be unemployed.

Impossible to know unless some WH employees actually weigh in.

I think in general most people would do it to help others, because if things were different you might need the help.

...look for the helpers