Nashville flood imagery now in Google Earth

[robertlipe]

Google recently updated the imagery of Middle TN with hi-res captures from April, making it very fresh and very nice. But this morning, they added imagery from May 5 for most of the area.

This was three days after the worst of the rains had stopped, so the Cumberland, Harpeth, Mill Creek, and all their little buddies were on the way down, but just seeing the muck and seeing it in context is pretty cool. Just turn on historic imagery (the little clock at the top) and roll the time slider back to May 5 which is probably only one click of the left arrow away for now, but that'll change over time...) and see your favorite area after the floods. You can see cleanup crews and piles of trash starting to form in many places, but many areas are still submerged in these shots.

Before anybody asks "why nothing fresher", let me remind you that rain comes from clouds (that don't disappear instantly after it quits raining) and clouds are between the satellites and the ground.

[robertlipe]

Same view for those of you not sitting in front of an IMAX monitor.

The view is from the Spring Street cloverleaf. I've attached a KML that approximates this view.

[Sduck]

Pretty amazing images. The kind of stuff one always hopes one will find in google earth but it's never there. This time it is.

If you look closely you can see the piles of furniture out in our driveway after the downstairs got flooded. Amazing.

[robertlipe]

I don't want to enter "one-upmanship" contests with anyone here. I assume everyone had it worse than me, personally. (I spent two days under our home pumping water to avoid mold problems. Ours was an annoying inconvenience. We didn't lose anything and we dont' know anyone that died.)

My biggest fear of this imagery is that some may think that the story from a few days after the event tells the whole story. Hours really do make the difference in this particular story. We all saw the imagery of cars bobbling like bath toys and buildings floating down I-24/Mill Creek. It was boggling.

We have photos of family friends canoeing in their living rooms while watching their piano float down the driveway. You can see their house in the lower right of photo 26 of http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll ... 815&Ref=PH If you're a FB friend, you can also see me helping to strip the drywall, cabinetry, and most possessions from their home. They're definitely not alone. But to look at the imagery presented in Earth, they "just" have some muck in their yard and a little trash pile in their driveway. The crew hadn't yet arrived to strip the entire ground floor of their homes to the studs. But in this image, mere dozen of hours after they had five feet of water in their ground floor, they had "only" a mucky color in their yard and junk in their driveway.

It's totally awesome that this imagery is on "permanent" record now in Google Earth historic imagery. That's more than Nashville got from the national media from what I can tell. I really hope this imagery isn't concluded to be the final story, but it's awesome that it's at least part of the story. And if we well tell the best part of the story that we can, that's probably pretty cool.