My dad, John Cramer, reporting in from Houston:
Dear Kathryn,
The joke of the day from Houston, home of the Astrodome, is that George W. Bush, former managing partner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, has finally found a way to fill a baseball stadium.
Love,
Dad
I know a fair amount about mercenaries and private military contractors (see my somewhat incomplete Mercenaries & PMFs archive), and have been anticipating with a certain sick feeling of de ja vu that I was going to have to blog how all the usual suspects from Iraq and Africa turn up in New Orleans, the world's newest Third World country, so the sentence New Orleans may well have more mercenaries and National Guards operating in it than there are citizens left at the moment gives me a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I have been focusing primarily on the cartography of Katrina and would appreciate reader recommendations for articles on the involvement of Private Military Contractors. No one knows where all of the bodies are buried in that field, but I at least know where some of them are.
And yes, I know about Halliburton. I want the rest of the names, especially those guys carrying guns. UPDATE: Ah. Here are some names:
[ADVISORY: Those who came here for the maps and aren't interested in my personal political opinions, stop reading here.]
Continue reading "Private Contractors & New Orleans" »
Jerry Walker writes:
Hi Kathryn,
Not sure if you've seen this map or not. You can point and click and see what the water depth is in New Orleans, street by street. It's a google map, but I can't find the map on google itself.
http://www.cybergod.net/gmap/http://mapper.cctechnol.comThanks so much for all you're doing!
Jerry
I tried it and it seems to work! Now all it needs is the addition of an address input field. But if you have the address already up in Google Maps in a separate browser window, then you can pretty much find what you are looking for.
It's creator, Teh Treag (aka cjames) says
We started off with LIDAR terrian model of the city. Then, with some reported water depths in the city we projected the data into our model. I'm still waiting on the data processors to get some more data to me; right now we have over 2.5 million data points loaded into MySQL using the spatial features. I expect this number to tripple as they continue refining the modeling.
The page uses AJAX to query the database for a 200x200m area and averages the result.So far, the data appears to correlate well with the post storm images.
Gods of Google Maps, you've answered my prayers once by adding the Katrina button. Please come through for me by adding the depth info.
To Google Earth users: are their overlays already integrating this info?
(Someone else may have sent this URL to me previously, but I've been pretty busy and have lost some of the things I planned to check out in the rising tide in my inbox.)
SEE ALSO: Flood Level Maps, which gives you an idea of which parts were flooded at various stages on the flooding and this Customized Dynamic Map of New Orleans. You guys are heroes. This kind of information is tremendouly important to the people whose houses or relatives were there. Also, it may even have cash value to the victims, in that I suspect it will make dealing with FEMA claims officials and their insurance comapnies a lot easier if there is physical evidence of the damage to homes.
ANOTHER READER QUESTION:
kathyrn,
have you found a site that would have the results of the toxic water in New Orleans. My husband has been down there since last Tuesday trying to get the MCI telephone sites up and running. Passed the worrying stage about the gun shots around him but now am worried about the toxic water problem and long term effects.
An extant toxics map sounds to me a bit ahead of the data we have right now by a good bit. But it is something that should exist, even if it doesn't. I have been talking about the need for information on the water depths and water movement with the tides and other factors, and still haven't come up with a solution for that yet, but her question is an important one. Anyone know if there have been surveys of toxics. I recall that preliminary looks seemed to suggest that the toxics problem was not as bad as it might be, but that could have changed and might have been wrong in the first place. What can be done to get this information together?
(Image of chemical sheen on the water courtesy of Shawn McBride. I think it's a NOAA image acquired through Google Earth with overlays; I gather it's a search he did for someone who enquiring about their house.)
Also, if you can load a really large image, have a look at this NOAA image, just to get the scale. I'm trying to find someone's house on an area of the city not covered by the Digital Globe images, and I'm a little lost, because NOAA doesn't preserve orientation in its interface. But the sheen, oh my God . . .
UPDATE:
One question that came in today in an email from China this morning is what people in countries far away can do to help. The easy answer is "send money," but given that the US is perhaps the richest country on the planet, that answer does not seem very satisfactory. And the in the grand scheme of things, the problem was never one of money, but of quality of thought. (This is not necessarily true on a local scale, only on the national scale.) We had money, but it was spent on the wrong things. It may indeed take mountains of money to get us out of this, but we need a lot of help that money can't buy.
German reader Holger Schick made some astute observations in the comment section of the New Orleans Levee post which I wanted to pass along. While in Mt. Kisco, NY, returning from Elizabeth's dentist this morning, I saw the perfect illustration to go with Schick's comment -- this assemblage of suburban assult vehicles -- so I took the photo to the right.
Maybe your President Bush is now willing to deal with the problem of global warming and the effects emission of CO2 is having.
It's 35% of the global energy that is consumed by the US. They are driving cars that are consuming 15 or up to 25 litres per 100 kilometres (in Europe the cars are consuming 8 litres on average).
"Mr. Bush, sign the Kyoto protocol! Make laws to regulated CO2 emissions in your country."
I'm sorry for the people, that have lost their home in the New Orleans area, but in my point of view political maturity and even environmental awareness is actual not existent in the US. Human are responsible for their future for themselves. If we not stop the global destruction of the environment, we and especially our children's children will have to pay the price for it.
I wouldn't say that political maturity and even environmental awareness don't exist in the US, but rather that they are rather hard to find in US policy. And ecocide neither provides for the common defense, nor promotes the general welfare, austensible reasons for the founding of this country as stated in the Declaration of Independence. Schick's general point holds whether you personally think that global warming makes category 5 hurricanes more likely or not and whether you believe in global warming or not. There are plenty of other accidents waiting to happen, and the more we damage the ecosystem, the more there are.
Have Bush & Co. learned this lesson? I doubt it. But perhaps the American public has.
MEANWHILE, Savanna, the woman who was trying to plot an escape route for her family, writes that they were just rescued by FBI agents in a Hummer. Now there is the proper use of a Hummer, not driving to the Pleasantville post office.
PS to German readers: Ich lese und schreibe Deutsch. Wenn Sie nicht auf English schreiben koennen, Sie durfen mich auf Deutsch schreiben.
This is the first day of school for my son Peter, who is going into the third grade. My daughter Elizabeth starts preschool next week. This morning I've got all kinds of school-year related things to do. (The picture to the right was taken yesterday morning in Middletown, CT, on the last day of summer vacation.)
There are many queries in my inbox about the state of flooding at specific NOLA addresses. I will try to get to as many as I can over the course of the day.
My do-it-yourself instructions are in my post How to Find Out if Your New Orleans House Is Under Water. If you can't get the results you need, email me and I'll give it a try when I get a moment.
I'm back from my Labor Day weekend travels through Upstate New York, Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut, and am going through my inbox. I wasn't completely offline, but my internet access was fairly limited while I was out.
Here's New Orleans resident, whose house looks OK to me on the satellite photo:
If the neighborhood appears OK, why can't we just get some things? Is it the roads? I wouldn't stay. But all I have are the clothes on my back.
On the face of it, this doesn't seem like a very good idea. I'm not sure it's even legal, though last night in the 10 minutes of CNN TV coverage I have actually watched, I saw this gal go in with Christian Amanpour, but it may take her press credentials to get you in. (Question to those in the know: Is it legal or even possible to get in? CNN reports that people from Jefferson Parish were allowed back in today. How to interpret that in general is less clear.)
My reader escaped with her life. Why risk it for stuff? (My husband is a book collector. I understand in some detail why someone might want to go back for stuff, even in a dangerous situation.) And the return under these circumstances might be more traumatic than losing all her stuff. I hate to direct her to an agency whose head, several days back, should have been stripped naked except for a large name tag, and lowered slowly through the roof of the Superdome at its worst, but it is probably a better idea to apply to FEMA for aid. They now have a web page for aid applications at their Individual Assistance Center:
If you have been affected by a disaster you may be eligible for federal assistance. Please select one of two options below: Register for Assistance or Review your Application. For disaster assistance information you may want to read the Applicant Guide, view information about Federally Declared Disasters by Calendar Year, or review support from other available Agencies.
They also have a phone number for those without computers hooked up to the Internet:
Call 1-800-621-FEMA (3362)
The speech or hearing impaired may call (TTY) 1-800-462-7585
What they have to offer those without either Internet access or phone service is not so clear.
And what will come of an application isn't clear. See this August 30th Miami Herald article for details: Skittish FEMA may not assist individuals:
FEMA is giving aid to local governments, but has yet to decide on helping individual storm victims. One reason: criticism that it was overly generous last year.
Presumably they have backed off from the position described in the Miami Herald, but I would love to hear about the results of such applications.
MEANWHILE, CNN reports that "the" levee break has been patched. I presume they mean the biggest levee break.
In disasters since the invention of the news media, in each era coverage of disasters is highly mediated by the coverage of the most recent war. (I wrote an essay about this once, which I don't have to hand at the moment.) This is the era of "embedded" journalists and media complicity. I can't find words for what to say about this: [UPDATE: note transcript of segment below; two sequences were conflated.]
There was a striking discrepancy between the CNN International report on the Bush visit to the New Orleans disaster zone, yesterday, and reports of the same event by German TV.
ZDF News reported that the president's visit was a completely staged event. Their crew witnessed how the open air food distribution point Bush visited in front of the cameras was torn down immediately after the president and the herd of 'news people' had left and that others which were allegedly being set up were abandoned at the same time.
The people in the area were once again left to fend for themselves, said ZDF.
A city is destroyed, people are dying in vast quantities, and job one for the White House image makers remains to get public opinion off Bush's back. This makes me feel physically ill. I'm not being hyperbolic or metaphorical. It gives me a slight feeling of vertigo, a tension across my forehead, and a feeling in the pit of my stomach like I'm going to throw up.
(Appeared on Laura Rozen's War & Pieces, via Kevin Drum.)
UPDATE: Rivka has tracked it down and found the TV transcript. The story is not quite as reported by Laura Rozen's reader, though it remains repugnant:
Anchor: President Bush also paid the almost completely devastated small town of Biloxi a quick little visit as a part of his tour. Claudia Rueggeberg in Biloxi, how did the citizens react to the visit from the President?
Claudia Rueggeberg: There was a lot of variation. We talked to people here after the visit: one woman said a symbolic visit like that was better than none at all, and it was good that the President was showing his face there and looking at the situation up-close. Others tended to react with desperation. One woman burst into tears and said, full of rage, that the President shouldn't come here, he should finally see to it that help comes. All of the people, his whole entourage, these cars, they should be loaded up with supplies and not with bodyguards, and he shouldn't play the good samaritan here, and a staged visit like this doesn't help. And it actually was the case that all of a sudden this morning helper personnel showed up here, people who cleared away the rubble, who went through the houses in search of bodies, but exclusively along the route where the President traveled. Two hours ago the President left Biloxi again, and all of the helper personnel along with him.
Anchor: We know that President Bush promised quick help. Can that be felt where you are? For example, is there clean water and food?
CR: There's nothing here at all. Aside from what was cleared aside by the helper personnel this morning, the rubble is lying all over the street exactly as it was several days ago after the storm. There are no reasonable provisions; there's an emergency medical station and otherwise nothing. There is a stench of decomposition across the entire city. There are bodies that haven't been covered up in the buildings. Everything has been reduced to rubble, and help--from what we can see here and what others from other cities have also said--isn't coming.
Anchor: Thank you in Biloxi, Claudia Rueggeberg.
(Translation by Idealistic Pragmatist, based on her transcript of the ZDF video.)
Looking at the transcripts, it seems easy enough to figure out what happened. Laura's commenter, who appears to have been reconstructing from memory a news story he'd seen on TV, elided the New Orleans segment (which had Bush speaking at "one of the few" supply distribution points) and the Biloxi segment (which had cleaning crews working only along Bush's route, and disappearing afterward). Combined, these two segments became a story about supply distribution points disappearing after Bush's visit.
That story fit in well with Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu's report that construction equipment had been brought in to the levee for Bush's visit, and then removed again. And it also fit in well with the lefty blogosphere's traditional distrust of the American media ("There was a striking discrepancy between the CNN International report on the Bush visit to the New Orleans disaster zone, yesterday, and reports of the same event by German TV"), and their perceptions that foreign reporters are more likely to get it right.
Thanks, Rivka. This is, I think one of the general problems of television disaster coverage. Viewers are emotionally flooded and take in perhaps not all of the actual information content. The images are constructed in memory at a gut level without giving the viewer easy access to reviewing the information. I have watched all of 10 minutes of actual television coverage of the disaster, since we don't have cable TV and live on the north side of a hill with almost no TV reception. I think this is a real advantage.
This morning's New York Times has a write-up on a few of us who tried to help people get the information they needed about the state of the homes in the area where Katrina hit hardest:
For Victims, News About Home Can Come From Strangers Online
UPDATE: Welcome also to readers arriving from:
For those new to blogs, here are shortcuts to information about our collaborative maps project:
First of all, my Katrina archive contains all blog posts related to Katrina. The archive page is updated each time I make a new Katrina post, so it would be the best place to bookmark. On the other hand, it contains many images, so on a dial-up connection it would be slow to load. Also, separately, I have an online album of Katrina map images, Katrina Floods New Orleans, 2005.
As of now, my individual Katrina posts related to maps are:
Also, my sister, Karen Cramer Shea, has been guest-blogging for me while I was away over the weekend. Her posts are:
I think this is only the second time I've made the New York Times. The first time was in October of 1987: My anthology The Architecture of Fear, comprised of architectural horror stories, was featured on the front page of the Home section for Halloween.
PS: And may I also recommend the high quality Katrina discussion and analysis at Making Light, BoingBoing, & Amygdala.
Looking to the future we should consider how to rebuild New Orleans. Some question the wisdom of rebuilding, but permanently relocating 1.4 million people and abandoning a nearly 300 year old city is unlikely. Especially since it is so historically important. Not to mention it IS party town USA. So we might as well start considering how to build a better safer New Orleans since we are going to be starting from close to scratch.
1. What historic things don't we want to keep. Like the Canals, are the canals still useful and are they a good idea in a city with flooding problems? Also widen narrow roads.
2. Replace flood prone buildings with green space. The lowest lying areas should be reserved for parks, ball fields and green space. New Orleans should have areas for flood waters to go which will not put people or property at risk. Also consider not rebuilding directly next to old levies, a block of green space could reduce property damage considerably.
3. Raise the level of the city. Use rubble as fill and build on top. Large building in low areas should be build with a several floors of parking before the enclosed space starts.
4. All new levies should be rated for a category 5 hurricane.
5. Keep irreplaceable items or non duplicate services out of New Orleans. This is not the place for priceless historic treasures or corporate headquarters. Rebuild New Orleans to save as much history as survived and as a tourist destination but this not the place for critical national infrastructure.
6. Rebuild Roads and Bridges for evacuation not normal traffic levels.
7. Also it may be wise to avoid housing the long term disabled in New Orleans. These people are the hardest to evacuate. There is one report of 80 people dead at a nursing home. These people probably make up the majority of the dead. Only people with long term ties with New Orleans or family willing to evacuate them should be housed in long term care facilities in the city.
Continue reading "Rebuilding New Orleans" »
Kathryn is away and asked me to keep blogging on Katrina. I am her sister Karen who usually writes the Lunar Development Weblog. I figured a good place to start is to put the power of the web to use in getting help for those in need who have acess to it. Below are sites which can provide help or help locate family and friends.
NASA Stennis/ Michoud Employee Contact Board
Continue reading "Lost in Katrina" »
From my father:
Dear Kathryn,
Hello from Houston.
Mom saw your blog and wants to know if the St Alphonsus Church [2045 Constance St.] is
OK. This if the place where my father was baptized and which we would
have visited if we had made a trip to New Orleans.Love,
Dad****
From my mother:
Kathryn,
See
http://www.stalphonsus.org/photoalbum.htmlOn Constance Street,there are two churches. One is the oldest Catholic church in Louisiana. One built by the Irish and one by the Germans. The German church had old wooden sculpture and the original organ was still used. The other church has beautiful stained glass.
This area is between the French quarter and the water. The street where grandpa Louis [Lois A. Cramer, my great-grandfather -KC] lived when he was a baby was Tchoupitoulas St., which is parallel and right by the Mississippi and perpendicular to Constance street.
It would have been an interesting area to visit.
Mom.
I'll check later today.
UPDATE: So I'm on a slow, borrowed computer with a tiny little monitor and so checking things by satellite is much more difficult than on my Mac G5 with two big monitors at home where I have a veritable mansion of screen realestate to work with. On the other hand, to my complete astonishment, I see that Google Maps has made the job easier by adding a "Katrina" button to New Orleans Google Maps searches. So I typed in 2045 Constance St. and bounced back and forth between the before and after satellite views at various magnifications. If I was at home on my own equipment, I would also check the much more detailed NOAA photos, which would give a much better idea. but I'm not. So here is my tentative opinion on St. Alphonsus Church. First, I can't really tell which building in the image is the church, so I don't really know what I'm looking at. Secondly, the church appears to be located near the flooding stain so may be in standing water some of the time, but not deep water, most likely. Most importantly, I have a hard time matching up the builings in that block because some of them are missing. I don't know which they are, but there are disturbing absences.
Can anyone do any better? I would be interested to receive comparative jpegs using different methods to assess this location, since it is an historically significant church and since it would be very useful to be able to compare tactics.
UPDATE 9/16: Using the Microsoft VirtualEarth Katrina site, I got this nice shot. Looks like the church came through pretty well:
Lis Riba writes in the comments to the previous post:
Just seen over the wires:
The Associated Press is offering Internet access to a satellite image that covers most of New Orleans, detailed enough that viewers can zoom in to check on particular neighborhoods and streets.
The image's resolution is high, at 2.4 meters per pixel. It is posted in a format that allows quick viewing of any area a user zooms in on. Users can quickly see what areas are under water and what structures are still standing.The initial image was taken Wednesday and supplied by the company DigitalGlobe. AP will offer updated satellite images as as they become available.
The image is available at: http://hosted.ap.org/specials/neworleanssatellite/index.html
I tried it. It works and will simplify for many the kind of tasks I was up to yesterday. The NOAA images are better. AP could improve upon this by integrating the much more detailed NOAA images into the interface.
MEANWHILE, New Orleans burns.
For those needing the information, vua Matthew Harris, here are links to scanner feeds with live audio. I have not listened to them myself.
http://nola-intel.org:8001/scan (1000 user max) Orig Feed, LAPD/NG *BW Provided by 15minuteservers.com/nac.net NJ
http://nola-intel.org:8003/fema (1000 user max) Fema/etc Feed *BW Provided by 15minuteservers.com/nac.net NJ
http://nola-intel.org:8003/astro (http://nola-intel.org:8005/astro) (1000 user max) Astrodome Huston PD Feed *BW Provided by 15minuteservers.com/nac.net NJ
http://stfunoob.com/nola/scanner.pls - All 3 scanner streams (Both NOLA+Astrodome), 4000 slots combined.
http://204.9.66.211:9900/listen.pls Astrodome scanner mirror
http://nola-intel.org:8005/astro Astrodome mirror2 (1000 listeners max)
http://64.202.112.69:8080/scanner (1000 listeners max)
http://tinyurl.com/dc4tx
http://216.22.26.45:8002 (200 Slot)
http://stream.etherkiller.de:8000/no.mp3 (1000 Slot) (located in Europe)
http://us3.comclub.org:8000/no_scanner.m3u (1000 user max aggregate with below) (located in Texas, USA)
http://us3.comclub.org:8000/fema_scanner (1000 user max aggregate with above) (located in Taxas, USA)
http://radio2.wrpn.net:5000/nola_scanner.m3u (32 clients max, located in Columbus, OH, USA)
http://radio.artplz.com:8000/NewOrleans.mp3.m3u (600 max clients) (located in Dallas, Texas, USA)
The Forbes web site has published a rather good article on the various web efforts to use Google Earth and Google Maps to provide more information about the media's disaster images. I am quoted extensively. And just a moment ago, I noticed that the BBC has published a similar, also quite good, article along the same lines.
For those new to blogs, here are shortcuts to information about our collaborative maps project:
First of all, my Katrina archive contains all blog posts related to Katrina. The archive page is updated each time I make a new Katrina post, so it would be the best place to bookmark. On the other hand, it contains many images, so on a dial-up connection it would be slow to load. Also, separately, I have an online album of Katrina map images, Katrina Floods New Orleans, 2005.
As of now, my individual Katrina posts related to maps are:
Continue reading "Welcome, Forbes and BBC Readers" »
They're All Going to Visit Relatives?
CNN reports that the Astrodome is full and is not accepting any more refugees.
A reader asked a question a few minutes ago that seems to me a very important one: How can she help plot escape routes out of New Orleans given the information available on the Internet?
Could you direct me to a blog or outline a process whereby I might assist my sister and brother-in-law plan/plot a car route out of NOLA in the next few days?
They are on the "Esplanade Ridge", right below the Fairgrounds, and have not been flooded, thankfully. I'm trying to keep an eye on the flood levels to be able to inform them from this end (New Jersey).
Which is the best satellite source for monitoring daily levels?
The first post-Katrina satellite maps came out only in the last day or so, so real-time satellite monitoring of flooding is probably out of the question. A really detailed topo map would help, but would work better in combination with access to recent satellite photos that would tip you off to missing infrastructure. I've heard that the water in the city moves with the tides, so tide charts would be helpful: cover lower-lying areas at low tide. Other ideas?
Living Next to the Levee
Also in my email this evening, I got this note and picture:
I just want to say thank-you for posting the Levee Break pictures.
In 1998 I was Director of Telecommunications for Entergy. I rode out Hurricane Georges in the house located at 6812 Belaire Dr. NOLA. In the attached picture you can see our backyard being the spot where the Levee broke at the 17th Street Canal. The picture is oriented with East being the top. There is either one or two houses complete gone just north of our house. Directly across the levee is Bucktown to the west which looks now relatively dry, but was flooded during the storm based on other satellite photos.
Today on CNN, they were dropping sandbags directly in our backyard trying to fix the break. The Levee has been completely built up since we left in 99. You see see the Levee wall is relatively new cement.
It is a terrible tragedy and our thoughts are with all of our friends in Nawlins.
Fritz
And here is the picture that came with it:
Wow.
Not the Rapture
To anyone from the Washington Post reading this, can you PLEASE can the moralizing in the photo captions of your otherwise excellent photo galleries?
How can you even consider publishing passages like People who had resisted early evacuation orders, including many elderly and infirm . . . ? Age, infirmity, and poverty are lifestyle choices? This is a natural disaster, not the Rapture.
9/5 UPDATE: Boingboing reports:
The Coast Guard has set up links on its Homeport website so that people can request a rescue for a specific missing or stranded person in the area affected by Katrina.
Wow. That's great. I hope the rescues actually take place if you request one. But that's a huge improvement on the previous situation.
Continue reading "Escape Routes for Hurricane Victims" »
I've been thinking about this all day, and I have a few ideas, some of which I'm a bit too tired to try. But here is the problem. The question is not whether grandma's wedding pictures are getting ruined. The question for many people writing to me is whether their stranded relatives are dead, or at least the nature of their chances of survival. I am reminded of a 9/11 account we published in the 9/11 special supplement to the New York Review of Science Fiction. The husband of a friend, who worked on the WTC's 22nd floor, walked around looking for someone who could answer questions. An official asked, "What kind of questions?" My friend's husband replied, "Like whether my wife is dead." The information about depths and currents is absolutely crucial to those who might still have a relative trapped.
So here is a case in point. I have someone writing from Kosovo who works for the UN saying:
Kathryn,
Can you help me? I have a brother-in-law who is trying to stay in a warehouse two blocks from the River in New Orleans. I've lost contact with him by telephone and am trying to get an idea of the water level around his building, and thus how dangerous his situation is.It's a white two-story warehouse occupying the full block between Royal and Chartres Streets (on the north and south), and Press and Mantegut Strrets (on the west and east; address 2916 Royal St, zipcode 70117-7362).
Its an almost square building with the northeast corner cut out for a small parking lot. The way to locate it on a photograph is that it's on the northside of the Mississippi at the last big bend in the River before it leaves New Orleans, between Mandeville and Louisa Street Wharfs. You'll see a railroad track that runs along the river by Mandeville Street Wharf and then turns inland; the warehouse is a block inland next to the track.
Well that's probably too much information. But if you can get any idea from scanning photographs as to how much water is around the building, it will be very helpful to us in make decisions about what action to take. (I'm in Eastern Europe at the moment and doing what I can from the internet and telephone contacts, but I've gone about as far as I can for now.)
Lets help her. This seems like a case in which someone might potentially be alive, is known to have been at that location, and so conceivably might be rescued. First of all, here is the Google Maps neighborhood view.
On the face of it, things are not looking too good, since it's within the FEMA designated flood area. But how deep is the water? This is a two-story warehouse. Depth matters. It really matters.
Now a look to see what DigitalGlobe thinks. The results are not too bad. DigitalGlobe's image suggests that the building was not flooded at the point where their picture was taken:
Here is the DigitalGlobe shot from further away:
Note that the stain of flooding starts a block away. Water levels apparently vary with the tides and other factors, so it may be flooded at this moment, but it is crucially important that it is in an area where the water is not very deep, if there is any.
How can we make this better? Ideas, please.
A further example: Mike Moore asks in the comments of the previous post,
Flooding status at 6300 Paris Avenue
In Lake Terrace
Corner of Paris and Frankfort Thanks Mike
Here's his visual answer, a screenshot composited from Google Maps & a DigitalGlobe shot:
Definitely flooded, but what does that mean? Four feet? Or 20? If it was 4 yesterday when the picture was taken, is it 20 today at high tide?
IMPORTANT UPDATE, 9/7: There is now a clickable depth map for New Orleans at http://mapper.cctechnol.com.
Here is my discussion of how to use it in combination with Google Maps to check out your house. Also, my Katrina album has some some more sample images. Furtehr UPDATE: the depth map is now searchable by address.
IMPORTANT UPDATE, 9/17: VirtualEarth's Katrina Flyover has excellent aerial photos searchable by street address. The interface does not work on all browsers. If you have trouble, see my post describing a workaround.
Another IMPORTANT UPDATE, 9/17: Much more detailed instructions for using Google Earth to check on your house are posted HERE.
The best way to check if a New Orleans address is under water is by using Google Earth and the techniques and overlays created by the Google Earth Current Events Community. Since GE doesn't have their Mac version out yet, I myself can't do it that way.
UPDATE: Here are the promised Google Earth instructions from our hero Shawn:
1) Install Google Earth
a) http://kh.google.com/download/earth/index.html
2) Click the NOAA Overlay Link from Google Earth Community BBS
a) Mississippi Coast - http://earth.google.com/katrina.html
b) http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php/Cat/0/Number/92563/page/3/vc/1
i) Click "Open This Placemark"
ii) Either open file or save to disk and double click.
c) Check the Current Events Board for many more overlays of specific areas.
i) http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/postlist.php/Cat/0/Board/currentEvents/page/0
3) Once overlay is open in Google Earth, Enter your full address in the search field in the upper left corner. That will center the view on your address.
If you can't or don't want to do it that way, here is a shot-cut.
Step 1: Go to Google Maps and
enter the address. Click on the button that says "Hybrid" on the upper
right. You will get an image with a speech ballon pointing to a
thumbtack showing the location of the address on the satellite photo.
[IMPORTANT UPDATE: Bless their hearts, Google Maps has added a "KATRINA" button to New Orleans areas searchs, so they have automated some of the process I descibe here! Yee haw!]
Step 2: Click up and down the vertical ladder-like bar to see the image at various scales until you feel you can find the place on a satellite image.
Step 3: Compare your image to this superimposition of the FEMA flood map on a New Orleans satellite photo, created by the Google Earth Current Events Community. Here is a small version. Click on it for a much bigger picture.
If the address you are checking is fairly centrally located, you can also check your address image against the DigitalGlobe satellite picture of the flooding.
I hope to post some good Google Earth instructions later. I'll be out for several hours, so if you have some, post 'em in the comments until I get back.
OR PERHAPS I'VE BEEN TO OPTIMISTIC: While I was out driving around Pleasantville a little while ago, a reporter on NPR described all of New Orleans as being flooded. Perhaps she was being hyperbolic. But the more important question for those who need to know about specific addresses in New Orleans may be how deep the water and how swift the current; this all combined with information about the rise and fall of the tides.
BY THE WAY: If you get ahold of Before and After pictures of your house, BE SURE TO KEEP COPIES so you can submit them with your homeowners insurance claims, applications for FEMA aid, and other such. It seems to me that providing physical evidence specific to your address would be likely to expedite claims processing.
DigitalGlobe has a fine gallery of extremely detailed Katrina satellite photos up, and Shawn points out via email that the busy folks in the Google Earth Current Events Community have already figured out how to used them in Overlays, so you can, for example, superimpose a street grid, to have a good look at what happened to your house or that favorite spot (at least, as of yesterday).
Shawn showed me some extremely useful New Orleans big picture Before and After shots. Unfortunately, the DigitalGlobe usage agreement specifically prohibits publication of altered images without their consent. So I can't show you, but if you can run Google Earth, the overlays these people have come up with should allow you to look up specific places fairly easily. Shawn writes:
DigitalGlobe put out new Sat images a couple hours ago, now a lot people people biting their fingers can look up where they want in GE and see the flooding over a lot of NOLA.
And here's the Overlay as made by GE User Equitus from this forum post: http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php/Cat/0/Number/92563/page/0/vc/1
Overlay http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/download.php?Number=92563
For a sense of the resolution, note that the big 17th Street levee break is clearly visible toward the bottom right of the sample DigitalGlobe image to the left.
NOTE TO THE FOLKS AT GOOGLE EARTH: Finish your Macintosh version! People need it.
MEANWHILE, the September 1st New York Times editorial begins
George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end.
I confess I have been paying almost no attention to Bush's behavior at all. In his "management style," his minions will tell him when he's needed and he doesn't rise to occasions until they do. So I expected very little.
But what has happened to New Orleans seems to me to be rather like a stroke. There is a saying about strokes, TIME IS BRAIN: The longer treatment takes, the more brain damage occurs. Never mind that a "mandatory" evacuation should have provided a plan for the poor to get out, the New Orleans second-round evacuation currently in progress needed to start a lot earlier. The longer it takes, the less infrastrcture there is to do it with. The longer it takes, the more people roast, unrescued, trapped in their attics, or float away when the water gets above the roof, or try to make a break for it and drown.
BUSH UPDATE: Have received scathing reviews for his speech yesterday, Bush tries to do better on Good Morning America this morning, claiming, I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees. See Echidne for further details. I don't have the stomach for it this morning. (Via atrios.)
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