In the days after the Haiti earthquake last January, Google released high resolution satellite imagery of the destruction on the ground. Again, today the company is offering this same sort of imagery in the aftermath of a 6.9 earthquake in Qinghai, China.
The earthquake in Qinghai last Tuesday killed hundreds and injured thousands more, leveling many of the buildings around the city. As with last time, Google is working with GeoEye to provide high resolution satellite images, which you can download and view using Google Earth.
The company says that it is also working to aid in the relief effort there by creating a Crisis Response page, which includes a China Person Finder tool, Google News and real-time search featuring posts to Twitter and other sources and a map to help show user-contributed data.
Currently, the China Person Finder tool has only “about 100 records” being tracked and, while Google is offering both a Chinese version of its page as well as pages on both google.com.hw and google.com.tw, we have to wonder how effective the company will be in its efforts in China.
