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Storms chart new direction

A St. Petersburg company does brisk business selling updated maps for those affected by the recent hurricanes.

By MARK ALBRIGHT
Published September 20, 2005

The bad news is MAPSource's store in New Orleans has been shut down by Hurricane Katrina.

The good news is both the staff and stock are intact. And the string of five hurricanes that ripped up the Gulf Coast the past two summers has provided the St. Petersburg-based map publisher unexpectedly brisk business.

Insurance adjusters, disaster relief agencies, the military, media and others combing the wreckage have flocked to buy the company's street maps and wire-ring binder atlases to steer them around unfamiliar territory. And who could take a quickly assembled command post seriously that did not have a laminated wall map? Even the Humane Society bought 400 MAPSource street atlases to guide volunteers searching swamped streets for abandoned pets.

"Our Gulf Coast atlases are flying out the door," said Gene Ingle, who owns MAPSource Inc. with his wife, Marie. "But I don't know whether we'll reopen in New Orleans."

Store manager Wally Dunn has been allowed back only once to assess damage at the store in Metairie and retrieve what he could. He found 3 inches of water on the floor and damaged computers. "Long term, I don't think the economy of New Orleans will be the same for at least 10 years," Ingle said.

The company needed its Web site and stores in other states to capitalize on the sales surge. Its maps of Biloxi and Gulfport, Miss., have been hot sellers because they premiered only a month before Katrina hit. Nonetheless, Ingle plans to move ahead updating what will be MAPSource's eighth parish street map in the flood-prone Mississippi River Delta.

"It's amazing," he said. "One town isn't there anymore. Another one was buried under 30 feet of water."

The little publishing house - which has three cartographers, five stores and 20 employees - has exploited map market niches that eluded bigger competitors.

It has been a labor of love for Ingle, a onetime metro editor at the St. Petersburg Times , who left a career in newspapers in 1977 to pursue a lifelong obsession.

He has been a confessed map nut since age 10, when he begged to visit his father's office at a Midwest oil company. The office was filled with maps. "It was heaven," Ingle said.

A pack rat by nature, Ingle has made clutter the unifying decor theme at MAPSource's modest headquarters/print shop. The three work areas he claims as his own are flanked by bookcases overflowing with files. He fills his fellow workers' in-boxes with an endless supply of news clippings, obscure brochures and even phone books that might hold a piece of map-worthy information.

The cartographers - some of them professed "road geeks" - spin their computer graphics from databases compiled by bigger mapmakers and agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey. It's not all street maps. One cartographer compiled a mosaic poster of highway signs from all 50 states. He also claims a photo collection of every BGS (big green sign) found on the Florida interstate highway network.

Mapping brings to life the allure of the open road to cartographers. But they relish field trips to be sure remote byways they charted are still where they put them in MAPSource's last biennial update.

"A year after Hurricane Charley there are still lots of street signs missing or twisted around," said Justin Cozart, a MAPSource cartographer. "Whole mobile home parks disappeared and new ones appeared overnight."

His new map of the affected region includes the streets ofFEMA City, a Punta Gorda mobile home park the disaster agency set up for temporary housing after Hurricane Charley but has been unable to close.

Ingle didn't plan it, but Gulf Coast hurricane preparedness gave his business a lift. Map sales doubled in many Florida counties hit by hurricanes in 2004.

In Highlands County, disaster planners decided to make uniform the county's crazy quilt of road names. That helped MAPSource sell new maps by touting that 1,300 street names had changed. In Polk County, sales doubled to 1,100 atlases since three hurricanes intruded in 2004.

In Escambia County, the Sheriff's Office called MAPSource's Pensacola store manager at home after Hurricane Ivan to find street maps for disaster assistance people.

"Our guy was marooned, so he couldn't open the store. So he told the sheriff to just break in and take what they needed," Ingle said. "They took 4,000 maps. They tried to return them a couple months later. No way."

Hardly a retiring type at 71, Ingle tools around town in his "Hawkmobile," a 2004 Chevrolet Monte Carlo that's plastered with University of Iowa booster bumper stickers. The paint job is such a screaming yellow that his wife refuses to ride in it.

Ingle sold his first local mapmaking venture to Rand McNally in 1984. As soon as his noncompete agreement expired, he revved up another startup that went bankrupt within two years. The third venture, MAPSource, has grown in 14 years to annual revenues of almost $2-million. Ingle expanded to Louisiana by paying $40,000 for the New Orleans Map Co. that had been run by the same family for three generations.

In most countries, map publishing is a government function. In the United States, only a few government agencies are involved in map creation. Cities and counties make maps but do little distribution. Much of the work was privatized long ago into what has grown into a $2-billion industry

In Florida, the state Department of Transportation used to print and distribute the official state road map. Now its printing and distribution have been outsourced to Visit Florida Inc., a nonprofit tourist marketing company that pays for the state road map with sponsorship from Universal Orlando ads.

It's a fragmented industry dominated by the likes of Rand McNally and Universal Map. But plenty of regional mapmakers fill the needs of smaller markets. MAPSource maps 40 counties from Naples to Savannah, Ga., and west to New Orleans.

Nonetheless, the industry is evolving quickly. Time Warner's Mapquest and Google are big players in digitized mapping tools. Industry leaders think satellite-linked global positioning systems are the maps of the future.

"The only debate is whether GPS will come over an iPod-like device or a phone," said Sandy Hill, director of the 800-member International Map Trade Association in Hermosa Beach, Calif.

Ingle's mapmaking has been digitized since 1987. Recently MAPSource began offering some of its maps on CD-ROM. That was after a Volusia County law enforcement agency asked for street maps of a neighboring county for display on computers in police cruisers.

Ingle, however, remains steadfast that there is mileage left in the printed map. "There will always be a need for a paper map people can hold in their hands."

--Mark Albright can be reached at 727 893-8252 or albright@sptimes.com

[Last modified September 20, 2005, 01:54:19]