Google Earth re-refreshes New Orleans images

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 03 April 2007 06:40

Your IT - Home IT

Following criticism that it had 'airbrushed history' by loading pre-Hurricane Katrina images of New Orleans and surrounding areas, Google has updated its Google Earth service with fresh, high resolution photos showing the city in its current state.
According to John Hanke, director of Google Maps/Local/Earth, what happened was that volunteers at the company moved quickly to provide post-Katrina images in Google Maps and Google Earth.

Last September, those images were "replaced with pre-Katrina aerial photography of much higher resolution as part of a regular series of global data enhancements." The post-hurricane images and associated data were preserved on the Google Earth web site for ongoing use.

In light of the recent furore, Google has expedited "the processing of recent (2006) aerial photography for the Gulf Coast area (already in process for an upcoming release) that is equal in resolution to the data it is replacing", wrote Hanke, and those images were made available on April 1.

"Make no mistake, this wasn't any effort on our part to rewrite history," he added. "But it looks like this April Fool's joke was on us."

This incident, along with protests from various governments about the coverage of military sites and other sensitive locations, illustrates the growing use of, and attention given to, Google Earth.