Hurricanes and Waffle House
By Outside of the GoT podcasts, this site seems even more dour than normal the last couple of days. So since we all like maps and most of us like food (sometimes even food-like substances like ketchup) here’s 40 interesting food maps of the U.S. I was particularly amused by this:
FEMA has been using Waffle Houses as unofficial indicators of disaster recovery in recent years. Why? First of all, the chains are conveniently located (red dots) across the hurricane zones of the US (the gray lines on this map are hurricane and tropical storm tracks since 1851), as you can see in this map from Popular Science. Waffle Houses usually operate 24 hours a day and have exceptional disaster preparedness that lets them open back up quickly after a storm, the magazine reported. So whether a Waffle House has made it through an extreme weather event can be a handy thing to know. Because of this, Waffle Houses have been reporting their statuses to FEMA since 2012.
And here I thought they were testing whether the grease was made of an indestructible superproduct to be used against our national enemies.
Now back to our regularly scheduled bad news.