Google Earth Community: Updated! US/Coalition Casualites: Iraq & Afghan.

2006/01/04
I've finally found the 12 hours needed to do some much needed work on this layer.

Frank_McVey has spent many long hours manually updating the U.K. records: adding pictures and properly placing markers where GE gecoding and my patience fell short. He's had it done for nearly a month but I've been too busy to finally put it all together. Thanks so much Frank, sorry for the delay.
ADDED: 324 casualities from Afghanistan. Some folks were wondering why they couldn't find loved ones on the map. My original data source included only Iraq. Decided to add Afghanistan (they are seperated into different folders on the layer)
Added another month of Iraq data (leaving a lag as some reports/details drift in late). Iraq is now to Nov. 30th. Afghan up to Dec 28th.
Confusion over placement of markers I don't have street addressed for any of these points, so locations are resolved to hometown only (per GE's search/geocoding). Originally I displaced multiple records for a single city northward (adding to the above confusion). They are now stacked vertically, ala the Iraqi mil/civil casualities layer. Don't forget to tilt/zoom over big cities to see all the points.
There is a bit more information in the "Readme" placemark off the Eastern Seaboard check it out if you like.
Need volunteers: if you have nothing but free time, and would like to contribute to this project, please contact me at the email below. I have a list of soldiers that do not have pictures, and others with unresolved home towns. It's too time consuming for me to do all the error correction myself. So if you would like to pitch in, I'd really appreciate it.

>><<

A bit somber for my first post... but worth it. Appropriately, it's All Saint's Day.

Here's a map of the 2212 American and Coalition causalities since the war on Iraq began in March of 2003, up to Oct. 27th, 2005.
*Make sure to click on placemarks for personal information and photos*

I have absolutely no political motivations behind this work, so please don't read into any Pro or Anti-War/Bush/Iraqi messages that just aren't there. I just feel for the people that have died on both sides of this conflict (innocent, civilian, military or otherwise), and would like to help other grasp the magnitude of this loss. As you can see, there isn't a place in America that isn't affected. Don't forget to check out Europe, the Pacific Islands and a few other random places.

I am also interested in adding another layer representing the documented and/or estimated Iraqi military and civilian causualties. Although putting tens of thousands more points on the globe might be stretching Google Earth's (or your computer's) abilties. So we'll see.

Data was taken from icasualties.org
I asked permission to use their data, but have not yet heard back from them. If they are willing, I will use my scripts to pull data live from their database, as to keep this up to date. Google Earth's geocoding wasn't able to find some smaller US/foriegn towns (misspellings?). In these cases it's noted, and the placemark is set near the capital of the state or country.

Images are loaded directly from CNN's US & Coalition Causalities page. Irregularities in their jpg naming convention resulted in a hundred or so pictures available on CNN's site that aren't in this layer. Will try to fix if I have time.

Links to the appropriate icasualties.org (DoD, Centcom, News items), CNN pages are provided. Honor the Fallen's site has some nice stories about people... but no way to directly link to their pages. Searching for just the last name gives the best results.

I have done my best to correct errors. I will probably release another version (hopefully a URL with kml generated on-the-fly) in the future. I apologize if some of the foriegn names and home towns got screwed up, as there were some unicode/ANSI character problems. Will try to fix. If there are any errors for your friends or loved ones, please let me know, and I'll do my best to fix it.

Thanks for looking in...

Sean A. - purblindHorus )at( gmail )dot( com

Edited by purblind_horus (01/04/06 02:11 PM)