Google Earth Blog

The amazing things about Google Earth


flood

What’s that image: Earthquake and floods

Yesterday we mentioned that Google had pushed out an imagery update towards the end of April. Today we are having a look at some of the sights we have found so far.

On April 16th, 2016, Ecuador experienced an earthquake of magnitude 7.8. Google Earth has three satellite images captured the day after. All three images seem to have a bug where you cannot see the previous image in historical imagery but have to go back two dates to see prior imagery. Perdenales, Ecuador was not far from the epicentre of the earthquake and a number of buildings collapsed. The satellite imagery is not very high quality, but the devastation is visible if you look closely. To identify collapsed buildings, look for rubble in the streets rather than at the buildings, then compare with older imagery. See the fourth image in the slideshow in this story to see an aerial view.

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Collapsed buildings in Perdenales, Ecuador.

Further south, in the town of Portoviejo we found a collapsed building as well as signs of minor flooding.

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Collapsed building in Portoviejo, Ecuador.

The southern United States seems to have experienced a lot of flooding lately. Earlier this month we had a look at the flooding of the Mississippi River, which took place in January this year. There are now a number of images captured in mid March that show flooding in Texas and Louisiana.


The Sabine River floods Deweyville, Texas.


The Red River in flood near Coushatta, Louisiana.


The Ouachita River, Louisiana.

There are also satellite images of Austin and Houston, Texas, captured on March 12th. We are not sure if they relate to flooding and have not yet identified anything unusual in the images.

There has been further flooding in April, but there is not yet any relevant imagery.

For the locations featured in this post download this KML file. We have included in the KML some data from the USGS showing the epicentre of the quake and the area of impact.

What’s that image: United States

Yesterday we had a look at the most recent Google Earth imagery update. Today, we are having a look at what interesting sights can be found in the imagery, specifically in the United States. In a later post we will look at other parts of the world.

We have looked at the work of Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada before. Another of his works is now visible in the Google Earth imagery of San Antonio, Texas. It is called Nyssa, after its subject, Nyssa Gomez. Read more about it on the artists website.


Nyssa, by Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada.

We have already had a look at Super Bowl 50 in Google Earth. The Super Bowl title was won by the Denver Broncos, and when they got back home to Denver, Colorado, they held a victory parade. See ground level photos of the event here.


Crowds gathered for the Denver Broncos victory parade.

Heavy rains in December 2015 resulted in the flooding of the Mississippi River. We mentioned it at the time and had a look at previous Mississippi flooding events. Now, there is quite a lot of imagery in Google Earth relating to the event. St. Louis, Missouri, is at the confluence of three large rivers, the Mississippi River, the Missouri River and the Illinois River. There are a number of satellite images of the region captured in early January showing the flooding. There was more flooding in March but no related imagery as yet.

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Flooding in St. Louis, Missouri.

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Flooding in St. Louis, Missouri.

There are also images further down the Mississippi as the water travelled south.

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Flooding of the Mississippi near Osceola, Arkansas.

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Flooding of the Mississippi near Arkansas City, Arkansas.

There was a Tornado in Dallas, Texas, which was part of the same group of Tornadoes as the one we featured yesterday. See some aerial images here. There is an image of Dallas in Google Earth that was captured a few days after the Tornado in response to the event. But, based on this map we believe the main path of the tornado started just north of the image. There is also this funny story relating to the event. A demolition company charged with demolishing one of the houses damaged by the tornado relied a bit too heavily on Google Maps and demolished the wrong house!

For all the locations featured in this post, including outlines for some of the relevant imagery, download this KML file. Remember that much of the imagery can only be seen by switching to ‘historical imagery’.