The "after" pictures are in a different tint or colour scheme which means they are biased (or rather, you are biased by the colours like the missing green). Bad comparison.
The clearer contrast is in the built-up areas in "before" photos that are wiped clean of man-made structures "after". It's hard to imagine how anyone in or near those survived.
I wasn't paying nearly as much attention to the colors, myself...
Why are the images tinted though? They did the same interface for some flooding that happened in Australia, and the 'after' images were also tinted similarly.
They aren’t tinted. It’s all about white balance and levels.
My guess is that satellite images are usually heavily edited to give them a natural appearance (and also to make them consistent with other satellite images) but right after a disaster that editing step is probably skipped due to time constraints. I would imagine that the post-disaster images are much closer to the raw satellite output. I turned on grayscale on my Mac – that helps a bit in that it eliminates the color differences but contrast and levels still do not match.
The destruction is still very obvious. Pay, or example, close attention to bridges, buildings and trees.
