Black Mountain - Tuesday, December 11th. Maps will be on display beginning at 6:00 p.m.; a presentation on the material will begin at 6:30 p.m. in the Black Mountain Public Safety Building, 106 Montreat Road, in Black Mountain.

Enka - Wednesday, December 12th. Maps will be on display beginning at 12:30 p.m.; a presentation on the material will begin at 1:00 p.m. at the A-B Tech Enka Campus, in the Haynes Building, Room 200, 1459 Sand Hill Road in Enka.

Asheville - Thursday, December 13th. The maps will be on display beginning at 6:00 p.m.; a presentation on the material will begin at 6:30 p.m. in the Asheville Public Works Building, large conference room (Room A109), 161 S. Charlotte Street, in Asheville.

Digital versions of the three Buncombe County preliminary maps are currently available for public review by contacting your local planning department or searching the North Carolina Floodplain Mapping website at www.ncfloodmaps.com. Residents and business owners who visit the site will find an ‘address locator tool' to help them locate individual properties and see their relationship to mapped flood prone areas. Other tools are available to assist them with viewing and downloading digital data from the website.

The three meetings provide an opportunity for residents to see the results of the advanced digital technology used to create the new flood maps. Black Mountain residents should go to the presentation in Black Mountain, Asheville residents to the Asheville meeting and county residents to the Enka meeting.

County and municipal officials will be on hand at each of the three sites to help residents locate particular properties on the maps and determine their level of flood risk. Representatives from the North Carolina Floodplain Mapping Program and North Carolina Floodplain Management will make short presentations on the map production process, features of the new maps, how they can be used to reduce future losses due to flooding, and their connection with flood insurance and floodplain management. Attendees may also see a demonstration of the North Carolina Floodplain Mapping Information System. Following the presentation, state and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) representatives will be available to answer questions about the mapping process, flood insurance coverage, and floodplain management topics.

Buncombe County's new Flood Insurance Rate Maps were produced by the N.C. Department of Crime Control and Public Safety under a unique partnership with FEMA. The partnership agreement, signed in September 2000, assigns to the department the primary responsibility for creating and maintaining all Flood Insurance Rate Maps for North Carolina. The effort to remap the state's floodplains was spurred by the devastation caused by Hurricane Floyd, which flooded large areas of eastern North Carolina and left thousands of people homeless. This disaster highlighted North Carolina's vulnerability to natural disasters and the need for accurate, up-to-date floodplain maps.