Google has updated the imagery of the New Orleans and Gulf Coast areas on its Google Earth and Google Maps services, so that it now shows the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina. The company has also denied that it attempted to “rewrite” history.

Recently the US House Committee on Science and Technology accused Google of “airbrushing history” by replacing satellite images of areas damaged by Hurricane Katrina with pre-hurricane images.

The subcommittee chairman Brad Miller even suggested that Google might be trying to airbrush history.e

Writing on the company blog, John Hanke, Director, Google Maps/Local/Earth, said that Google was surprised by the controversy given that the change had been made many months earlier and that the Katrina imagery was available on a dedicated site. 

Hanke explained that in September 2006 the storm imagery was replaced with pre-Katrina aerial photography of much higher resolution as part of a regular series of “global data enhancements”.

“Nevertheless, we recognize the increasingly important role that imagery is coming to play in the public discourse,” wrote Hanke, ”and so we’re happy to say that we have been able to expedite the processing of recent (2006) aerial photography for the Gulf Coast area (already in process for an upcoming release) that is equal in resolution to the data it is replacing.”

Hanke also pointed out that after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005, a group of volunteers from Google worked with NOAA, NASA, and others to post updated imagery of the affected areas in Google Maps and Google Earth as quickly as possible:

“This data served as a useful reference for many people — from those interested in understanding what had happened, to friends and families checking on the status of loved ones and property, to rescuers and relief workers.”

Hanke ends his note assuring the public that the company was not attempting to rewrite history:

“Make no mistake, this wasn’t any effort on our part to rewrite history. But it looks like this April Fool’s joke was on us.”

Related:

Entry was posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2007 at 11:47 am under Google, Internet, Science and technology.

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