The New York Times has written an article (you can see it at CNET here or at the New York Times) which talks about the way the Google Earth forums has responded with these images and helped hurricane victims and potential victims check on the damaged areas in Google Earth. Here’s another story by Forbes. And here’s a story by the BBC on the topic.
A woman named Kathryn Cramer has dedicated her time during the past week to helping hurricane victims with information using Google Earth and her blog. She’s is mentioned in the above stories. She has posted links to several stories around the world she’s heard about on these topics here.
Weather
Up To Date Katrina Damage Imagery
The Google Earth team has worked hard this weekend and has updated their earlier release of imagery. The first part includes even more NOAA imagery of the damaged areas. Click here 
to download the new network link enabled overview of the entire collection. This network link will automatically update to the latest imagery. You will see dots where the images are located and can individually load each image. As before, these are large images and you may not want to turn too many on at the same time due to computer memory.
Google has also developed a very cool dynamic overlay of imagery from Digital Globe of the New Orleans area. This is a network link which is based on your current view which will load tiles of images. Download this link here .
[UPDATE] Google Releasing Katrina Imagery
Google has started releasing image overlays of damage from Katrina for Google Earth. They made the announcement here and on the Google Earth home page. You can really see the before and after differences with these images (you can turn the images on and off to do comparisons or slide the transparency slider on and off).
[EDIT September 3: Google has made available a huge amount of imagery of the damaged areas tapping into all images from NOAA and all images done by readers of their forums. You can read about it in their post here. Or, you can download the NOAA imagery links now. This will show the location of all the images they have, you can click on a red dot and then select to download the image. NOTE: these are 4Kx4K images and will take up a lot of memory. Don’t turn on too many at once or your machine will get overloaded.]
The GE developer team mentioned they realize some of the user-supplied images are just as good or better right now. But, these images are placed on hefty servers with mega bandwidth, so they should be more reliable than some of the other sources.
It seems to me Google could make these images available through the Layers fairly easily. I don’t think it would be a good idea to change the primary database with these images as hopefully the signs of destruction will go away over the coming months. Although, I’m sure the buildings and economies will take years to rebuild.
New Katrina Damage Photos in Google Earth
These are some of the first of what I assume will be many image overlays showing the terrible damage done to the Hurricane Katrina ravaged areas. This is an overlay of one of the new Digital Globe images taken recently showing the flooding and damage in New Orleans. The overlay was posted here at the Google Earth Forums. NOTE: these are photos being placed by users of Google Earth, but are placed in the proper coordinates. They are not officially part of the Google Earth database.
Here are some horrifying overlays from Bay Louis, MS from another post here. Turn on the different photos in the Places sidebar – it will take a while to load each of these images (even longer if their server gets overloaded). These high resolution pictures show awful paths of destruction through this area of Mississippi. It’s like a hundred tornados came though here.
Katrina Damage Satellite Photos in Google Maps/Earth Soon
The satellite imagery firm Digital Globe, which supplies much of the satellite data in Google Earth, has announced that they are working to bring updated imagery of the areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina. From the announcement:
DigitalGlobe, Google and GlobeXplorer (www.globexplorer.com) are working closely to provide the updated imagery via Google Maps, Google Earth, and the GlobeXplorer suite of products including ImageAtlas as quickly as is possible.
As soon as this data is made available, I will post an announcement here at Google Earth Blog.
See this entry for a video of the demolished region tied to placemarks in Google Earth.