Hurricane Milton remains a strong Category 5 hurricane and is expected to make landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast on Thursday.

TAMPA, Fla. – A Southern restaurant chain known for its inexpensive breakfast offerings has earned a reputation as a haven during extreme weather. However, sometimes a weather event is simply too large for individual chains to handle and causes them to close to ensure the safety of employees and guests.

In the lead-up to Hurricane Helene in September, several Waffle House locations in the Florida Panhandle surrounding Tallahassee closed ahead of the hurricane’s arrival. Similar scenes are now unfolding in west central Florida off Milton.

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

“Our mission remains to keep our employees out of harm’s way,” a Waffle House spokesperson told FOX Weather. “Accordingly, we will preemptively close restaurants in the areas expected to be hardest hit, with the goal of reopening them as soon as it is safe to do so to serve the communities that have supported us over the years.”

WHY THE WEAPON HOUSE INDEX IS IMPORTANT IN EVALUATION OF SEVERE WEATHER EVENTS

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

One commenter wrote, “The best part is that Waffle House has ninja teams that will go to stores with generators, food, equipment, etc. after the emergency is over to get them open as quickly as possible.” While another said: “The ultimate indicator of whether or not you should evacuate.”

The restaurant chain is so closely tied to the weather that members of the Federal Emergency Management Agency developed the “Waffle House Index” as a measure to assess the severity of weather events.

The index highlights the severity of the impact, with a code of “green” indicating a restaurant is offering its full menu and has power. Once a code “yellow” is reached, a restaurant typically has a limited menu, and a code “red” means a Waffle House is completely closed.

The Waffle House Index is an informal metric, named after the Waffle House restaurant chain, to determine the impact of a storm and the likely amount of assistance needed to recover from a disaster.

(FOX Weather)

MILLIONS are bracing for Milton’s wrath as a Category 5 hurricane barrels towards Florida as time for evacuation runs out

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp toured the Waffle House headquarters outside Atlanta on Tuesday.

Kemp said he visited the restaurant’s so-called storm center and thanked the team for their work on Helene and Milton.

Waffle House did not provide details on how long its restaurants might be offline, but said there is a possibility some of its buildings could suffer significant damage.

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