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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."
Unfortunately, post-Katrina images for only about half the city are available.
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
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
Also, Katrina images have been available on Google Maps since at least Saturday, as I was browsing it Sat afternoon. Kudos to Google - with that kind of speed, they should be running FEMA, too.
Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
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.
For those interested in reading on geological hazards, check out Engineering Geology, An Environmental Approach:
0 52770X/qid=1126049667/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl 14/002-0778082-8548014?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/013
Not intended as flamebait (I contributed $100 to the Red Cross), but people just refuse to learn to move away from flood-prone areas, even after they are destroyed.
The author survived the 1972 Rapid City flood in which 237 people were killed and adopted the philosophy of never rebuilding homes in the flood plain. Rapid City learned its lesson, and only commercial and industrial buildings are allowed in the flood plain. There are also a lot of parks and public use areas on the flood plain.
Yet, the monetary amount of damage done by floods increases with time as people continue to develop flood plains and barrier islands. Folks, flood control structures fail too often to justify their cost to the country's taxpayers. It is a shame thousands died in New Orleans and we will again fail to learn our lesson.
The Federal Disaster Area declaration is nearly as large as the United Kingdom. How would you go about getting everything to everyone in a few days?
Also in the US disaster preparedness and recovery are normally the venue of the States and localities. By tradition they are supposed to ask for aid. Supposedly, I cannot find the story right now, the LA Govenor asked Bush for some time before calling out the Guard. It is the State that "by tradition" orders the Guard, Bush respected that but sometimes I think traditions stink. There are 330,000 Guard members in the US currently. I would think more than a small percent could be moved provided the States will act.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Cool; I got here when I googled slashdot.
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!
Gah... can't... move.. damn clouds out of the way.
Snopes to the rescue again!
In particular:
I can see my house! Oh, bugger...
http://media.putfile.com/OlbermannSwings
From the opinion piece:
Got any proof of that, or are you just parroting the anti-Bush talking points?
The Feds always take two or three days to show up, and five to seven days to reach full strength. Local authorities are ALWAYS responsible for the first 72-96 hours of a disaster, that's how all the plans are made, and it's primarily because of the dithering incompetence of the local Democratic pols and the collapse of the New Orleans police department that so many people could not be rescued this time.
The military won't put people and equipment directly into the path of a hurricane, lest they become victims themselves and lose their airlift capability. But shortly after the storm passes, they pour in.
Military air, sea, and land operations began on Aug. 30, and in fact, there were more than twice as many soldiers on duty by day 5 of Katrina than on day 5 of Andrew in 1992. And that's after moving them in over a much larger area than Andrew affected. You can't wave a magic wand and move people and machines in an instant, but that seems to be what some of the ignorant anti-Bush ranters are expecting.
Unless you have invented a Star trek transporter beam, just can the ill-informed bitching and do what you can to help, OK?
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
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.