From Manitoba Historical Maps on Flickr.

With yesterday's news of an earthquake in Chile I found myself browsing blogs for information and found an excellent tool. Hungary's Association of Radio Distress Signalling and Infocommunications' Emergency and Disaster Information Service is an interactive online map tracking all manner of emergency's and disasters around the globe.

This is an amazing webpage since it provides massive amounts of information in an easy to use format. It also shows many disasters that you are unlikely to see on the evening news. Earthquakes, mosques collapsing, norovirus outbreaks, power outages, you name it - it's here. This is a great website to spend an afternoon at just to learn more about what's happening in the world.

Recently Google's street view was launched in Canada. Strangely Winnipeg was excluded even though they recently covered the city, but I expect that that will be fixed in the coming months.

I spent a few minutes poking around the places of my childhood on street view to see how things had changed. Overall, it was a rather sad and surreal experience.

- My childhood home is now unspeakably ugly.
- The area in town where I used to ride my bike through forests and corn fields is now cookie cutter houses.
- The field I launched model rockets from is also plagued by housing.
- My favorite toboggan hill at Kaufman's flats is fenced off and forgotten.
- Bridgeport is getting a new bridge but lost the hotel which built its infamous 'sin town' reputation.

I'm worried what things are going to look like for my children.

As I mentioned previously Flickr user Manitoba Historical Maps's fire insurance maps from 1957 are incredibly detailed. What makes them really interesting from an urban exploration perspective is that they show the tunnels under and between buildings.

Here are a selection of tunnels I found which might still exist and be accessible;

Riverview Health Centre

Saint Boniface Hospital

Mulvey Warehouse

Saint Boniface Aquaduct

The other day I noticed that Flickr user Manitoba Historical Maps had uploaded some fire insurance maps from 1957. They cover a large section of the city and are astounding in their detail. They show the construction of all buildings in an area along with descriptions of what they used to be.

The maps of Osborne village caught my eye so I downloaded some maps and stitched them together so you can see what things looked like 52 years ago.

Osborne south of River looks essentially unchanged except for the businesses (there used to be a barber and radio store) while the north area above River is completely changed. What is currently a sea of condos and apartments is a nice neighborhood of houses with a bible school and a far smaller Safeway store on the corner.

I find these maps to be fascinating since they show the history of the neighborhood and give amazing detail into the homes and businesses. I could look at these maps for hours.

Now I need to find some place that can print this large enough that I can hang it up in my living room.

I'm going out for lunch tomorrow and I asked Google for some directions:

Google needs walking directions...