Flood damage in Google Earth

We have looked at flooding a number of times in the past, including satellite and aerial imagery of flooding and its aftermath, crisis response maps, simulated sea level rise and most recently a data error resulting in a city appearing to be flooded.

Google has not released any ‘imagery updates’ maps since the release of the ‘Voyager’ layers at the end of June, so it is not easy to find new imagery. However, we have come across two sets of imagery related to flooding that we thought worth sharing.

The first one is an image of a zoo in Tbilisi, Georgia. When we first saw the story in the news of a number of zoo animals escaping during a flood, we found the location in Google Earth and saved a Placemark. Since then, we have been checking back regularly to see if it gets updated – and it has.

Tbilisi Zoo, Georgia, captured on June 18th, 2015, about 4 days after the flooding.

There are also several YouTube videos of wild animals roaming the city, including a tiger, a bear, a hippo and either a crocodile or alligator. Sadly, many animals were killed by the flood and some of the survivors had to be shot.

The second set of imagery is of Austin and Houston, Texas, captured between May 27th and June 1st, 2015. Austin, Houston and surrounding areas experienced heavy flooding a few days before the imagery was captured. However, the earlier imagery is too cloudy to see much and the flooding appears to have mostly dispersed by the later imagery. However, there is evidence of flood damage especially along the Blanco River southwest of Austin.

Fischer Store Road Bridge as pictured in this article

There is another bridge washed away further downstream and a number of houses have been damaged or washed away.

On Lake Travis, north of Austin, there are floating houses that are obviously designed to be able to move to some extent depending on water levels. However, some houses have been washed downstream due to the flooding.

Those purple roofed houses in midstream come from a location further upstream. See the KML file at the end of this post for the exact location.

We were unable to find any obvious signs of flood damage in Houston, Texas. If you find any please let us know in the comments.

Here is some drone footage of the Austin flood on YouTube.

For locations mentioned in this post download this KML file.