‘Waffle House Has Shut Down All Its Locations in Tallahassee’: CNN’s John Berman Reports from Florida Capitol Bracing for Hurricane Helene

You know it’s a serious hurricane when the local Waffle House is closed.

CNN’s John Berman noted this longstanding bit of Floridian wisdom as he reported live from Tallahassee Thursday as Hurricane Helene barreled towards the state.

The storm was a Category 3 as of Thursday afternoon, when Berman spoke to anchor Jake Tapper about the storm’s progress, and was likely to grow in strength to a Category 4 when it made landfall.

Helene was expected to make a “dead-on hit” where Berman was in Tallahassee, and in addition to the storm surge, wind, and flooding impacts in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina were all bracing for “historic flooding,” Tapper noted.

The hurricane was on track to pass right over Tallahassee, said Berman, with up to “100, 110 mile per hour winds” that would be “just treacherous,” and the storm surge along the coastline about 20 miles to the south was expected to be extremely dangerous, reaching “as much as 20 feet.”

A local county commissioner had just told Berman they were expecting lots of trees to come down during the storm, leading to “hundreds of road closures” for “days and days.”

“They have all kinds of beautiful big trees here, including those huge live oaks — thousands of trees could come down,” said Berman. “That’s a serious threat to homes, cars, anything on the roads.”

The Tallahassee Democrat, the local newspaper, was reporting that “even Waffle House has shut down all its locations in Tallahassee,” noted Berman, “which is a sign, because anyone who’s been in a hurricane knows that Waffle House tries to stay open no matter what. It’s the last thing to close, the first thing to open unless conditions are really bad — those really bad conditions are what they’re expecting here, Jake.”

According to the Democrat, Waffle House had closed all its locations around Tallahassee and Crawfordville, about 18 miles south. A photo of one of the Crawfordville Waffle Houses with its windows boarded up was posted on social media, drawing alarmed reactions from storm watchers. “Safety comes first,” a spokesperson for the restaurant chain told the paper, and the closed locations would be reopened “as soon as it is safe to do so.”

The restuarants famous for their “scattered, smothered, & covered” hash browns — and, of course, waffles — achieved a legendary status for hurricane response after then-Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Craig Fugate started using a “Waffle House Index” as an “informal metric” to assess how well a community was functioning and recovering after a natural disaster like a hurricane. With hundreds of locations spread through 25 states, concentrated in the Southeast where hurricanes frequently occur, tracking how Waffle House is faring provides valuable data for disaster response agencies.

Waffle House Index Green means a location has power and is open, with a full menu. Yellow means the Waffle House is open but has no power or power only with a generator, and so is offering a limited menu that can be cooked on natural gas grills.

Red means closed — and it’s a rare state indeed for a Waffle House.

In early 2020, the Waffle House Index made headlines for a non-weather reason, when hundreds of locations were closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Tallahassee ended all public transportation services as of 2 pm ET Thursday until the storm passed. Florida State University and Florida A&M University campuses shut down and students were told to evacuate from dorm buildings to shelters or to leave town. Publix, the grocery store chain headquartered in Florida, also closed a number of locations around Tallahassee and extending into Georgia.

Watch the clip above via CNN.

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Sarah Rumpf joined Mediaite in 2020 and is a Contributing Editor focusing on politics, law, and the media. A native Floridian, Sarah attended the University of Florida, graduating with a double major in Political Science and German, and earned her Juris Doctor, cum laude, from the UF College of Law. Sarah's writing has been featured at National Review, The Daily Beast, Reason, Law & Crime, Independent Journal Review, Texas Monthly, The Capitolist, Breitbart Texas, Townhall, RedState, The Orlando Sentinel, and the Austin-American Statesman, and her political commentary has led to appearances on the BBC, MSNBC, NewsNation, Fox 35 Orlando, Fox 7 Austin, The Young Turks, The Dean Obeidallah Show, and other television, radio, and podcast programs across the globe.