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April 2, 2007 | Last week, there was a hubub of offended folks who, after being told, were incensed that Google replaced aerial images of a devastated, post-Katrina New Orleans with pre-Katrina images. The cries ranged from calling Google irresponsible to talk of some vast conspiracy to wipe any evidence of a destroyed New Orleans from the American psyche. After a few days, even mainstream media caught on and applied a less sensational reporting with somewhat more somber tones. No real reply ever emanated from Google.
Alas, it was an interesting turn of events, so we here at CSE went to the Google News reporting form and pointed them to one of the more sensational articles described above. We received a reply that is copied for those interested below. Thank you for your note. In September 2006 we published imagery in Google Maps and Google Earth from one of our data providers that substantially improved the imagery detail for dozens of cities around the world, including New Orleans. While the higher resolution New Orleans imagery was taken before Hurricane Katrina, we continued to keep Katrina imagery available at http://earth.google.com/katrina.html for access by all. We know how important Google Maps and Earth imagery is to our users so in response to thoughtful user feedback, we have accelerated our New Orleans imagery processing and are today making available sub-meter high resolution imagery of the region from 2006 in both Google Maps and Earth. Regards, The link above is facilitated for you HERE. The above link appears to a direct response to all the hubub created by their removal of the post-Katrina images from the general aerial search as there were no links and no mention of any alternate pages - such as the link above implies - that contained post-Katrina images. Glad we could help clear this up.
4.2.2007 |