Mapping Katrina's damage
2005-09-08 09:34
New Orleans - Internet users are using mapping technologies from Google to track storm damage in the ravaged city of New Orleans and help residents find out what has happened to their homes, Forbes.com reports.
Website www.scipionus.com is encouraging users to annotate a Google Map of New Orleans with information about specific locations.
Anyone with something to add can enter a street address and leave a marker on the map.
Separately, another group of webusers are overlaying photos of flooded neighborhoods onto the mostly pre-hurricane satellite photos available from Google Earth and posting them on a Google discussion board.
"It's not as good as the original satellite image, but you can get a sense of whether a house is underwater or not," says Katherine Cramer, a blogger who helped spark the effort.
Meanwhile, Google has begun releasing new images of the flooded areas and posting links to a number of user-supplied image overlays.
On the web: Forbes.com - Hurricane map
- Dow Jones