UPDATE: *A correction, from blog reader Nathan, due to an errant placement of an identifier in Google Earth: "You have a couple of pictures of the Pleasant View Motel and Trailer Park. The actual motel and RV park were north, across the street. The picture on the web page is actually of the John Deere dealership's parking lot. You are looking at the used equipment lot."

ORIGINAL POST:

Today in my video blog, we use Google Earth to look at before and after aerial shots of Greensburg, Kansas, recently made available by Google and Digital Globe.

The tornado tracked SE to NW across the entire city, according to the updated NWS tornado track. I have outlined the boundaries of Greensburg in red on their map below. (For more information the curl of the tornado track see this blog entry).

The imagery in the video blog below shows complete destruction of homes and businesses, significant flooding, and the complete removal of trees (save, perhaps, their trunks which are hard to see from above).

http://wwwa.accuweather.com/video/video_inline_launchV3.asp?video=http://qt.accuweather.com/flashvideo/vblog_ferrell/jf-20070523-ge-greensburg&category=&thumb=http://qt.accuweather.com/flashvideo/vblog_ferrell/jf-20070523-ge-greensburg2.jpg&hd=true

NOTE: THE VIDEO ABOVE MAY BE PRECEDED BY ADVERTISEMENTS ON AD-SUPPORTED SITES

NOTE: When speaking about the trailer park in the video above, I said that people should get into an underground shelter. Obviously, since the trailer park was flooded, their shelter, if they had one, would have been deadly. When building tornado shelters, this situation should be taken into account.

BONUS: Here are a few things that I didn't notice while doing the video blog.

First, check out how this house in the middle of the street. I'm not even sure which side of the street it's from. Despite what Wizard of Oz or Twister might tell you, seeing an entire house move significantly in a tornado is fairly rare in tornado damage because generally everything gets decimated. This probably is a testament to the huge size of the tornado and strong winds within, or possibly to the construction of the house frame. I'm surprised no one got a photo of this from the ground -- if you've seen one, let me know.

UPDATE: A blog reader sent in a possible photo of this house from the ground. Read this entry for more information.

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AFTER:

In these shots, it looks like the roofs have been ripped off these garages and you can see the cars (no doubt heavily damaged) inside. Debris, some of it possibly vehicles, has been blown into the lake behind the long garage.

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These shots show not only massive house destruction, but major flooding from the local creek after the storm. If you'll recall the radar loop, they had to go through the entire storm, with very heavy rain, before the tornado reached them.

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And here are some areas that I did go over in the video:

This is (again) a reason not to live in a trailer park. In the case of this tornado, not only were the trailers tossed around and destroyed, but the park was flooded.*

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Here we see a local Motel completely destroyed, with tractor trailer trucks strewn about afterwards.

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The green water tower which you can see destroyed in this picture is also viewable in the before & after shots, I have circled it in the "before" shot for clarity. You can see it close-up in photo #5, 6, 11, 12 and 25 here.

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And finally, here is a before and after shot of the Greensburg High School. This was a brick building, which was still partially standing (see photo #14 here).

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