A friend sent a link to a NOAA website with recent photos along the Mississippi Gulf Coast showing the damage. You click on a box, and then go down another layer and click on another box, and end up at zoomable photos that are truly astonishing.
It gives quite a perspective on just how widespread the damage is.
There’s no photos of south Louisiana yet, but I suspect those may be even more horrific when they come out.
Good Lord. There are no words.
I thought the official who said “This is our tsunami” was exaggerating. He isn’t. There are simply miles and miles of neighborhoods that are absolutely flattened. Given that the storm took a slight easterly turn, I hope the folks of coastal Mississipi had enough warning to get mostly out.
I just looked at some of those. My. God.
Now, in some of the state maps that apparently have islands in red, have those islands dissappeared? :eek:
Tripler
Man alive. . . I thought ‘Andrew’ and ‘Hugo’ were bad.
If you have Google Earth, you can do a before and after. I’m looking at Bay St Louis on the Mississippi coast. That little town is just demolished. Both bridges across the bay are gone.
I’ve actually gone in on the closeups and looked at specific buildings (or, in some cases, piles of rubble) that I remember well, and it’s just astonishing to see what survived and what didn’t. Also really scary.
I agree, calling it “our tsunami” was pretty damn accurate.
Hardly.
What was the final death count of the tsunami? It was in the hundreds of thousands, was it not? I can’t seem to find total figures online right now, but it was huge.
So far, they’re talking about deaths in the thousands from Katrina. Yes, it’s tragic, and there’s been an incredible amount of property damage, but I don’t think it’s even a blip compared to the tsunami.
Oh, don’t be like that. Taken on a damage-per-area basis, I’m sure it’s comparable.
Cite?
I can’t find any reliable facts, but just scanning a globe it looks like the area the tsunami hit (primarily the Indonesian, Sri Lankan, Indian, and Thai coasts) is much larger than the area the hurricane hit.
I don’t think you can compare dollars to dollars, as a dollar buys a lot more over there than it does here.
Plus, to me at least, loss of life is the biggest thing; most buildings can be repaired or replaced, but the dead people are gone forever.
I was speaking solely of the effects of the storm surge having a comparable effect on the buildings on land.
I don’t think anyone here is stupid enough to compare the two events life-for-life. Nor should that be a hindrance to still comparing the extent of the local devastation to the similar local devastation tsunami areas experienced.
It’s also got an emotional impact on the people who have been directly that is probably very similar. It doesn’t matter if 100 or 100,000 died; if me and my neighbors have lost our homes, our communities, everything reduced to rubble in just a few hours, it’s going to be incredibly difficult to deal with.
I think he means that the damage done to the area where the hurricane struck was likely comparable to the damage done by the tsunami to a given area of the same size. The overall area hit and damage done by the tsunami was unquestionably larger.
Make that “who have been directly affected.”
Exactly. I thought I was quite clear. And let’s face it; on a human scale, you’re really only concerned with your neighborhood anyway. Individual victims of Katrina are suffering no less than individual victims of the tsunami.
How does one do this?
Do you have Google Earth? If not, go to www.google.com and click on “More”.
Down the page is “Google Tools”. “Earth” is one of them.
(Sorry if you already have it, just being sure…)
Download that and it’s easy to zoom in on the area you want.
Then I just open the link Mama Tiger gave, it’s broken down into little squares. Find the general location of a square in Google Earth. Just open one of those squares and then flip back and forth to Google Earth until you find recognizable landmarks common to both views.
Hope this makes sense, it should after you give it a couple of tries. And the NOAA views are not oriented exactly N-S, but you can rotate the Google Earth view to match, just find a road or something and rotate the Google, makes it a lot easier to find common features.
Thanks! Turns out I was actually making it harder on myself with what I was doing. If you go to the Keyhole or Google Earth BBS (which I can’t access from work, otherwise I’d post the URL), you can download “overlays” into Earth from the BBS. They’re big files, though: 2.5+ megs.
Yesterday, on CNN, they were doing Google Earth images, followed by their own helicopter views. The most shocking were coastal neighborhoods in Mississippi, which were smashed to flinders for about 6 or 8 blocks back from the beach.
I got a new link to NOAA photos of New Orleans proper:
These had to have been taken before Friday because the Oakwood Mall on the Westbank is still intact, and it’s since been looted and burned out. But I was able to locate the house we sold a month ago, which is intact and apparently undamaged (the neighborhood it was in never flooded).