Anderson Cooper, Hurricane Ike, and Gilchrest Texas

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 03:38:00 GMT

In times of disaster and loss, sometimes it's what's left behind, not what's gone, that delivers the most poignant image of the event. Tonight on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, a lone house, the only one left standing on its block in Gilchrest, Texas, in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike, provided a dramatic reminder of the destructive power of nature.

Anderson Cooper interviewed the owner of the house via phone, and here it is as seen in a video on the CNN Web site.

Here's the same area, shown from above in ArcGIS Explorer prior to the hurricane.

ESRI has obtained recently flown aerials from NOAA, and has published a Web service with the updated imagery to assist GIS users in the disaster recovery effort. The imagery has been collected, cataloged, and combined using ArcGIS Image Server, with the resulting mosaic published via ArcGIS Server. The screenshot below shows the swipe tool revealing the pre-Ike (on the left) and post-Ike (on the right) imagery of the area.

In the post-Ike imagery the lone house can be spotted, shown within the red circle below.

Here's a tilted view of the same location, compare this with the CNN video still at the top of this post.

ArcGIS Explorer Blog : Hurricane Ike, Gilchrest

Anderson Cooper, Hurricane Ike, and Gilchrest Texas