How FEMA Uses Waffle House to Measure Disasters
wabe.org
wabe.org
Don't know how often waffle house will pop up on hacker news but here is a couple fun facts about them.
+ They have opening ceremonies for all restaurants where they put the key of the front door in wet cement (since they are open 24/7/365)
+ They hire a lot of illiterate people and people out of jail starting over from scratch, so they have an innovative way to communicate what people order to the cook. The waiter / waitress can 'write' or scribble whatever they need to do, but will set up plates to communicate the order to the cook with condiments [0]
Whenever I road trip (ie all the time), I always eat at Waffle House. Out of hundreds of visits, I've never had a bad experience, and the food is always very good.
My wife and I are doing Valentine's Day dinner there because they're so enshrined in our travel adventures.
Unrelated but interesting.
Other than makeing me crave cheese omelets, this reminded me of Google's flu trend service - http://www.google.org/flutrends/ .
It also reminds me of "Ambient Findablity" by Peter Morville - http://www.amazon.com/Ambient-Findability-What-Changes-Becom... .
FEMA et. al. really need to know the facts on the ground.
People lie. Intentionally (in Katrina, a whole lot of people a short distance away from the National Guard and Coast Guard's constant stream of helicopters depositing the rescued at the stadium ... no way you're going to convince me they didn't notice the monster Chinooks), unintentionally because of poor or incomplete information (ever notice how you can't believe anything in early news reports of this sort?), etc.
But Waffle House has a system, that is part of what keeps them in business, and that system turns out not to lie. The limited menu is fascinating: limited electricity, i.e. running off generators, no waffles for you!
I suspect even Wal-Mart, which has a serious disaster system, also being in disaster prone areas including the southeast, can't match that early on, because they're responding as much to anticipated need as real needs, although maybe they can data mine purchases ... assuming the data link to HQ is still up (don't know if they have a satellite backup).
And they can always reallocate a lot of surplus stuff they didn't turn out to need. Or you just don't worry, in the days after this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Joplin_tornado there was a great surplus of bottled water in the disaster area, increasing stacks and stacks of it everywhere. Figuring out how much was rushed to the area would give you essentially no useful, or at least new data.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240531119047166045765424...
McDonalds, back in the Ray Kroc era, was more into disaster recovery than they are now. That was when all McDonalds outlets flew an American flag 24 hours a day.