Donald Noble's Website

Google maps now have satellite imagery of New Orleans, taken in the last couple of days, and showing some of the impact of Hurricane Katrina. This can be compared to the standard satellite and road maps.

While seeing the damage caused by the flooding brings home the chaos it is causing to those affected, it is almost as impressive that we can do this, having satellite images of a disaster zone publicly available for no cost within a week of the event.

It is almost wrong that we can sit in the comfort of our own homes, and watch 24 rolling news coverage of the suffering, and then when we get bored of that, switch to the spy in the sky satellites to get a different perspective.

I (optimistically) hope that the politicians will learn from this, and listen to the engineers that told them this was likely, and that they needed money to improve the levees. Unfortunately I think that long term protection of residents is such a mundane task that those in charge will look for new and exciting ways to spin up war and fear. The “War on Nature” doesn’t really have a good ring to it, although it is what we are already doing with our ever increasing consumerism.

This entry was posted on Saturday 3rd September 2005 in Blog, Engineering and tagged climate change, construction, Engineering, environmental, Links, mapping, natural-disaster, Photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comments are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.