One Mile of Devastation

The photos and videos that have emerged showing the destruction caused by Hurricane Michael have been shocking and evocative. None of these images has been more effective in showing the scale of the disruption caused by the tropical storm than the New York Times' Hurricane Michael: One Mile of Devastation in Florida.

This simple but powerful visualization simply stitches together a series of oblique aerial views of one mile of Mexico Beach. As you scroll down - the web page scans horizontally, flying over one whole mile of a devastated stretch of the Florida coastline. The aerial images are labelled with road names and the locations of different buildings which used to exist along U.S. Highway 98.

So many of the buildings along Mexico Beach have been completely destroyed that the New York Times has felt it necessary to also add a map of all the destroyed buildings to its article. As you scroll horizontally along this map the footprints of all the destroyed buildings are shown in red and the severely damaged buildings are colored yellow.