It appears that one man’s boredom playing with Google Maps can end up costing tax payers over a half-a-million dollars in landscaping costs.

Chris Silver Smith runs a blog named The Natural Search Blog, covering all sorts of aspects of search and Search Engine Optimization. During one of his Google Earth searches he stumbled across a set of oddly shaped buildings at the US Naval base in Coronado, CA. The four L-shaped building seemed to form the World War II era Nazi symbol, the swastika. He took a screen cap and posted it on his Flickr account, and now, as they say, the rest is history.

As the image gained in popularity, the media picked up on the story, and the Navy began taking flak for the buildings design and apparent insensitivity to victims of the Nazis. According to a story by the Associated Press, the Navy did notice the resemblance at the opening of the Naval Construction Force’s barracks in 1967, but wrote it off as it was not obvious from the ground.

Who could have predicted services like Google Earth and Windows Live would come to be, and widely used at that?

Now that attention has been drawn to the situation, the Navy has agreed to spend up to $600,000 to renovate the landscaping of the property, alter some of the walkways, and other plans to help alter the appearance of the 40 year old building complex.

Related:

Entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 3:51 pm under Google.

Read more entries by Sean P. Aune.
Stumble It!