Hurricane Matthew has been called a 'once-in-a-lifetime' storm in which evacuation is a matter of 'life or death'. But it was only when Waffle House announced it was closing 25 locations that many Americans decided the storm must be really bad. The beloved 24-hour restaurant chain is famous for staying open during natural disasters, so much so that even a 'Waffle House Index' was created. FEMA unofficially uses the index, color-coded much like country's terrorism threat advisory scale, to gauge how severely a place was hit by a natural disaster.