12/31/2003: Bam quake satellite images

Archer pointed to this very fine satellite image of the earthquake destruction of Bam, Iran. The image was taken one day after the big quake. I took the 1.4 Meg, 3000x3000 image, selected a decent, representative section of it, and sized it for our consumption above.

The middle of the image is the mud/brick citadel that had been the world's biggest mud fortress. I isolated on it and created this image.



Like the video of this has shown, it's just not there anymore.

It would be great to have a before / after comparison. On the first image, it's hard to see what's destroyed and what's not. The darkened areas look like trees. The lower right area seems to have been hit less hard. It seems like the area to the left of the citadel would look more like that section at the lower right, but the buildings are almost completely gone.

And it's not clear how much of that crack across the top middle used to be... stuff.

Here's a site with some photos of before to see what the mud city looked like
http://www.sacredsites.com/december2001pages/bam.htm

If you look at the full-scale photo at the link, you can see that modern structures are still largely intact, but the spaces in-between them, probably individual or family dwellings, are obliterated.

Tragic, unimaginable destruction and casualties.

I think Saddam did it.

"And so castles made of sand, fall in the sea. Eventually"
-jimi hendrix