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Post-Katrina Images on Google Maps
breadiu writes " Satellite imagery of New Orleans taken on Wednesday, August 31st is now available on Google Maps. Enter 'New Orleans' in the search field at the top of the page, or drag and zoom the map to the area. A red 'Katrina' button will appear at the top right of the map, next to the existing map buttons. Older images for the area are still available too - click the "Satellite" button to switch to those."
A lot of my memories of visiting New Orleans included visiting the great cemeteries there. St Roch and St Vincent De Paul both look flooded. Obviously the living people in the city are more important, but the great landmarks still have a lot of meaning.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
I work at a retail store in California, about 40 miles from Sacramento.
The other night, I had a couple come in, claiming to be from New Orleans, showing me an ID as evidence. They looked pretty poor and in dirty clothes, and the ID was correct.
They kept barraging me with questions asking for handouts... wanted a $100 tent for free, et cetera et cetera. I gave them the number to the local red cross chapter.
Has anyone else experienced refugees from the gulf coast in their area? What in the WORLD were they doing here.. no idea heh.
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
This is one of the creepiest things that I've seen in a long time. It reminds me of the before and after pictures from New York and similar stuff from coastline around the Indian Ocean.
Maybe such high resolution pictures of the disaster region will spur people into getting the authorities to do things like pay for the renovation of land features to reduce the effects of natural disasters, rather than divert the money to other projects, leaving victims high and dry (or in this case, low and wet).
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Superdome - before
Superdome - after
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Maybe the next half will be up tomorrow...and did you see the (I think) superdome. They weren't kidding when they said the roof was ripping off!
Microsoft is like...no, it's much worse.
They're gonna kill me for the bandwidth this uses, but I managed to find a picture of Six Flags (a series of large theme parks for you non-USians, second only to Disney's stuff) after it was hit. It looks pretty disturbing to see rides halfway submerged.
Six Flags:
http://www.ecsis.net/~gregday/park.jpg
Park Map:
http://www.ecsis.net/~gregday/map.pdf
The rest of the NOAA aerial images taken from a Cessna:
http://ngs.woc.noaa.gov/katrina/KATRINA0000.HTM
But I warn you, it's very creepy.
can be found at NOAA's site, at http://ngs.woc.noaa.gov/katrina/KATRINA0000.HTM
The pics were just taken off the plane and thrown on a server. North isn't always up, and the pictures aren't very well labeled. You pretty much have to know what you're looking for before you can make sense of the pictures. But they are much better quality than that of maps.google.com.
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
The company I work for has two franchised, retail stores in the New Orleans area--one on the riverfront downtown, and another in the Metairie area, north of the main town. These satellite images have provided us with the first comfirmation of the damage, and are remarkably useful (in our case, the stores appear to be dry 48 hours after Katrina's passage). The executives were delighted to see this, and earned the IT group some nice brownie points... There is a similar link on the Denver Post site today. The images are from the same company, and for the same date and time, but are markedly different in color from the Google images. Does anybody know why?
1. The new imagery goes in one zoom stop furter than the regular imagery. A sign of things to come?
2. The new imagery doesn't have any obvious copyright notices. Did they skip this step or is there a new invisible watermark?
that there are some places people should not live? Instead of throwing billions at a problem that will occur again it might be best to treat the city as we treated people along the Miss.
Move them.
While the mess in New Orleans is bad too many people are ignoring the devastation caused in Miss. and the surrounding areas.
The port area themselves are not affected as the city proper was. We can try to improve the wetlands. We can even hopefully undo the system underwhich the sediment of the Miss is forced into the sea instead of being used to rebuild the area naturally.
The real fact is, New Orleans has always been on borrowed time. I would prefer very much to spend the money to insure that the victims forever are high and dry.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Here are Google Maps links for two levee breaches.
1 7275,-90.121467&spn=0.002356,0.002879&t=e&hl=en
7 2056,-90.023303&spn=0.009430,0.011517&t=e&hl=en
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=new+orleans&ll=30.0
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=new+orleans&ll=29.9
Once more into the... never mind!
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
FEMA is now part of the Department of Homeland Security, and judging their response to this, aren't you glad a major city hasn't been attacked since 9/11?
Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
Type that in the search box. Note the parking lot with about 200 school buses parked in it.
Why didn't Mayor Ray Nagin mobilize those buses and get people out?
They had well over a day's worth of warning. Each bus can hold 70 people normally (more like 100 if you pack em in like they normally do in less-developed nations.) That means each trip evacuates at least 14,000 people. Figure about 2 trips to Baton Rouge, accounting for 5 hours worth of driving in the evacuation traffic to Baton Rouge (normally a 2-hour drive), and of course almost zero traffic going back IN, plus loading/unloading time. There's at least 28,000 people saved using just the buses from that one depot, way more if you pack the buses tight.
Problems finding drivers? Yell out "Who here has a driver's license? You! Get in the driver's seat, and we'll meet you in Baton Rouge."
They could have at least gotten out the people who weren't capable of walking to St. John or St. Charles Parish (see my posting history for a LONG thread about that...)
"Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
The City of New Orleans had its chance. They let 200 school buses sit idle while people died in their homes.
The State of Louisiana had its chance. They called up the National Guard after the fact, knowing it takes at least 48 hours to gather a unit together and issue equipment under the best of circumstances, and knowing that after the storm hit would be far from the best circumstances. For those who don't know, the states' National Guards, apart from those units called up to be federalized for foreign military action, are under the command of the Governors of the several States, not the President of the United States.
Sure, FEMA fucked up. Bush fucked up. But that's not the end of the story. The City of New Orleans fucked up. Orleans Parish fucked up. Jefferson Parish fucked up. The state of Louisiana fucked up. The level of ineptitude we've seen surrounding this disaster is astounding. No one body is capable of reaching that plateau of incompetence. It takes the federal, state, and local governments, working in dissonance. In short, it takes teamwork to fuck things up to this degree.
Local and state governments are pointing fingers at the federal government for failure to fund levee reinforcement and gutting of FEMA -- and the federal government will of course be pointing fingers at the local/state governments for having no clear plan for short-term evacuation, rescue, and aid. And they'll both be right. But the voting public will see only the most visible elements, like Aaron Broussard crying on Meet the Press and Geraldo Rivera crying on Fox News.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
http://ngs.woc.noaa.gov/storms/katrina/24429365.jp g
From the image that were cut off, it appeared as though cloud cover masked portions of the city at the time the photos were made. Of course that's pure speculation on my part, based on a small amount of evidence.
that happens during a normal heavy rain/flood ;)
they just take the coffins and bury them again lol
I live in Southeast Texas. We have an evacuation center in Beaumont. Many black people showed up to the center pre-hurricane landfall. We have some white people who have showed up too and many more people have showed up post-hurricane landfall. New Orleans was 68% black, so seeing a lot of black people shouldn't be surprising. New Orleans is also 20% below the poverty level. The large number of people without cars had no way to get out. Fear didn't have much to do with it. Also there have been a number of hurricanes to miss New Orleans contributing to a sense of invincibility. People just get a bunch of non-parishable food and fill the bathtub with clean drinkable water before the storm hits like their fathers and father's fathers did before them and survived.
Like I said before I live in Southeast Texas and we've had our share of near hits over the past few years. I remember as a child we use to do the same thing, treat hurricanes as an occasion for a party and just ride the thing out. Until 1992 when Andrew grew in strength at the last minute and threatened to hit us. That was the first time I remember our region receiving evacuation orders. What followed was a complete and total debacle. As everyone tried to use the same road to get out all at once at the last minute the traffic came to a halt. We moved 15 mph and not continously either, it was all stop and go. If it had hit us, I wouldn't be making this post. A van on a road ain't the greatest place to be in the middle of a hurricane. That situation was scary as hell.
After that warning shot across our bow, we got much more serious about planning evacuations. I don't know if we were the ones who came up with contraflow lane reversal, but after that we started using it. We set up evacution centers all across the state to handle massive evacuations. We have had a number of evacuations since then that have gone much better. We still try to make a party of it though. Go to some other city, get a hotel room, eat out at all these restaurants we don't have in our town. Treat it like a vacation. This makes evacuations somewhat expensive, but going and living in a highschool gym somewhere for a few days isn't anybodies idea of a good time.
Evacuating major metropolitan areas isn't exactly a cakewalk even when everybody has cars and a tank of gas. There is always some who think they can ride it out and a mandatory evacuation isn't actually mandatory. At least not in Texas, here it's just a declaration no one will help you if you stay. The mayor was lucky to be able to get 80% of his population out of the city pre-landfall. Maybe he could have done better pre-landfall, maybe not. Afterwards, well getting 100,000 people out of a city with one road out left and getting food, water, and medicine in to keep people alive while you do it, and conducting rescue operations, while the criminal portion of your city is in open insurrection just can't be easy. I'm sure a congressional commitee will thoroughly investigate and discover just what went wrong.
Like I said a lot of black people showed up pre-landfall so some of them had the resources to get out, but then a lot of them didn't too. Blacks aren't a homogeneous group of people you know. One should not make widespread generalizations about who has what resources. There are plenty of poor dead white people in Jefferson and St. Bernard parishes amongst others. The reason they aren't on tv is because the media has trouble imagining important things happening outside the city. As if no one lived in the parishes outside the city.