HURRICANE MAPS ENTERPRISES INFORMATION AND HISTORY Hurricane Maps Enterprises, the parent company of HurricaneTrack.com, is located just outside of Wilmington, North Carolina. We work with nearly a dozen medium to large market radio and television stations to produce exceptional hurricane awareness "campaigns" for hurricane prone communities. To date, we have had the privilege of working with over 200 businesses, including over a dozen media outlets throughout the Southeast to produce some extraordinary hurricane awareness projects. We began in the summer of 1995 with the goal of making hurricane awareness a year 'round thought process for North Carolinians. One year later, in the early summer of 1996, we produced our first poster-sized hurricane tracking map with a ton of information on the back side. Our first media partner was WAAV News/Talk/Sports in Wilmington, North Carolina. They provided the on-air promotion of the map and we rounded up the sponsors to make the map free to the public. It worked! Wilmington was impacted by 2 hurricanes that summer, Bertha on July 12 and Fran on September 5. This increased the need for comprehensive hurricane information. In 1997 we provided 5 radio stations, including WAAV and the powerful WPTF AM680 in Raleigh, NC, with an even better tracking map and more information on the back side. By 1998, we had moved into full color printing. Our 26" by 38" hurricane tracking posters were becoming very popular. Again, we worked with WPTF AM680 in Raleigh as well as WSFL FM 106.5 in New Bern, NC and picked up 4 more radio stations in the Wilmington market as WAAV AM980 was acquired by Cumulus Broadcasting. 1998 was also the year that we produced the now famous Storm Surge Inundation Map- Cape Fear Region with WECT TV-6 (NBC), the US Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA's Project Impact and a host of corporate sponsors, including Lowe's Home Improvement Warehouse and BellSouth, to name a few. The surge maps we produce are 28" by 40" full color posters showing the predicted storm surge flooding areas for all hurricane categories. These were an instant hit with the public as well as for public safety officials as the maps can be used to identify areas, right down to street level, that are potentially vulnerable to hurricane storm surge flooding. In 1999, we officially launched HurricaneTrack.com and have grown to become a popular website as for hurricane tracking and preparation information. We have quite a following of hurricane enthusiasts, emergency management officials, corporations, media outlets, schools and even people in foreign countries. The site has been featured on CNN and in Disaster Recovery Journal and continues to grow its fan base. We are the only hurricane related website to offer a browser-based, interactive hurricane tracking map system. Our visitors can even track the progress of our own Hurricane Intercept Research Team via a small icon of one of our actual research trucks. We also produced the WECT Storm Surge Map again, and have now included the remainder of eastern North Carolina; thus providing the public with the most up to date hurricane storm surge maps available. Aside from publishing, Hurricane Maps Enterprises also works in the field during hurricane and tropical storm landfalls. We have a trained and dedicated team of "hurricane interceptors" who will arrive at a threatened area a couple of days before a hurricane strikes and document the entire process. HIRT does not "chase" hurricanes. Our mission is to observe and research as many landfalling hurricanes and tropical storms as possible. With the informaiton and video that we gather, we can then better prepare people for THEIR next event with first-hand knowledge. While in the field we will obviously take video of extreme weather. Hurricanes are dangerous and we are not out there to have fun, per se. We have an array of high-end weather observation equipment, digital communications equipment to access real-time weather data and several video cameras and plenty of video tape. Once we finish a mission, we have documented the awesome and brutal forces of a hurricane. We then pass along our knowledge, experience and data to anyone who can benefit from it.