Yesterday John Hanke, director of Google Maps / Local / Earth, responded to the public outcry about the revision of Google Maps satellite imagery of New Orleans to pre-Katrina appearances. His response was published on The Official Google Blog.

Hanke said that the satellite images were actually changed in September 2006, but the outcry only took place in the last week or two:

... {The} storm imagery was replaced with pre-Katrina aerial photography of much higher resolution as part of a regular series of global data enhancements. We continued to make available the Katrina imagery, and associated overlays such as damage assessments and Red Cross shelters, on a dedicated site (earth.google.com/katrina.html). Our goal throughout has been to produce a global earth database of the best quality -- accounting for timeliness, resolution, cloud cover, light conditions, and color balancing.

Hanke went on to say that Google decided to expedite the process of replacing the pre-Katrina images with "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."

In my previous article about Google Maps' New Orleans satellite imagery, I had reported that images of the Lower 9th Ward were showing storm damage on Monday morning. This was confirmed by Hanke when he said, "That new data was published in Google Earth and Google Maps on Sunday evening." I'm glad to hear that Google reacted so quickly.