Des Moines’ interactive look at a stricken neighborhood
Six people in Parkersburg, Iowa and two more in nearby New Hampton were killed May 25 in the strongest tornado to hit Iowa in three decades, reports The Des Moines Register.The Register recently published a fascinating interactive look at the damage caused by the storm.
The site consists of an aerial photo of the town. Properties are color-coded to show how much damage they received. The warmer the color, the more damage:
Click on any property and before-and-after photos will pop up in the rail along the right side of the page:
Additional icons on the map link to video, photo galleries and individual stories. Readers who find all those little icons confusing have the option of turning off, say, just the video icons or just the story links. Or both.
The Register’s Data Editor, James Wilkerson, writes how the piece came about:
For base data about the properties, I scraped the county assessor’s web site using a perl script and put the results in a spreadsheet. There were about a thousand records for Parkersburg.
One of our graphics people, Kelli Morris, walked the route of the storm, taking pictures and talking to survivors. She then used the property spreadsheet to link to “after” pictures and built a library of survivor stories from her data and stories we published. We later went through all of the properties for which Kelli had pictures and downloaded the “before” photo from the assessor’s web site.
A parcel map shapefile was not available in a timely and affordable manner. So another graphics person — Craig Johnson — built his by hand. He then built the Flash display using some dummy xml data. Putting Kelli’s spreadsheet in mySQL, I built an xml page in php, which was used to fuel the final display.
The end product is something I believe is truly unique and visually
powerful. It also shows what can be accomplished by graphics folks who understand how to use data and think ahead about how to best weave it into their work.
Absolutely, James. Outstanding work. Just outstanding.
We should note that both Craig and Kelli are Iowans who moved away to work or to study: Craig spent a few years at The Herald-Leader of Lexington, Ky.; Kelli attended the University of Missouri. Both joined the Register after I left that paper in 2003. I don’t think Craig currently has an online portfolio. Find Kelli’s NewsPageDesigner gallery here.
Find the project here.
While you’re poking around, make sure you watch this video of a house being ripped apart. The footage was captured by an ATM camera, across the street.
Scroll down that page and watch the bank itself destroyed, as seen from its internal surveillance cameras.
Powerful stuff. Kudos to all my old pals in Des Moines.
June 11th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
Ok, that entertained the whole newsroom for about 10 minutes! I love the blend of video and still imagery, especially the bank camera footage.
I’m bookmarking this one, its perfect for when someone says: “A story can tell more than some ‘graphic’ or a design.”
It’s a perfect example of how to use interactive graphics to enhance and improve the reader’s experience.
June 12th, 2008 at 7:37 am
God, those photo look like S. Florida after Hurricane Andrew came through. Devastating to look at.
June 16th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Phenomenal use of a database, photos, video, and on-the-street reporting to tell the story.