February 21, 2013

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Stormwater Film Festival

By Scott Huler

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This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

On January 30, Plugged In’s unquenchable interest in infrastructure expressed itself in an actual tour of an infrastructure system itself. As part of ScienceOnline2013, the fabulous science/scientist/communications convention/festival/love-in held every year in my own city of Raleigh, I led a tour of the stormwater tunnels beneath the city of Raleigh.

I know all about these tunnels because I splashed around in them while trying to figure out what happened to my stormwater when I was reporting my infrastructure book, On the Grid.

Anyhow. We had a large time, pursuing the dual hypotheses that 1) stormwater management is pretty amazing, and Raleigh’s history with it is fascinating; and 2) the world is just cooler in general than you can even imagine, and we should all bear that in mind pretty much every second.

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I think a lot of people came along just for the hard hats, which I have to say came in pretty handy.

Anyhow. Part of what we did was document the tour to within an inch of its life, with the aim of thinking about how to effectively, quickly, and easily share science communication. The results of all that camera-pointing are in.

Here’s the one I did, using mostly video and pix from the tour participants:

Roland Kays started off the very day of the tour by using iMovie on his iPhone and creating this from a template.

John Romano shot pretty much constantly and put this out a few days ago:

From all this I learned above all that there is never an excuse not to capture interesting images of your work, and as Roland demonstrated, if you’re motivated you can share them in a very watchable format within hours of gathering them.

On stormwater we’ll talk more. Until then enjoy the stormwater tunnel film festival. By the way, this last is a video I shot a few years ago following a drop of water from my house to the river. You probably won't want to watch much of it, but in the interest of completeness and stormwateriness, there it is.

Scott Huler was born in 1959 in Cleveland and raised in that city's eastern suburbs. He graduated from Washington University in 1981; he was made a member of Phi Beta Kappa because of the breadth of his studies, and that breadth has been a signature of his writing work. He has written on everything from the death penalty to bikini waxing, from NASCAR racing to the stealth bomber, for such newspapers as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Los Angeles Times and such magazines as ESPN, Backpacker, and Fortune. His award-winning radio work has been heard on "All Things Considered" and "Day to Day" on National Public Radio and on "Marketplace" and "Splendid Table" on American Public Media. He has been a staff writer for the Philadelphia Daily News and the Raleigh News & Observer and a staff reporter and producer for Nashville Public Radio. He was the founding and managing editor of the Nashville City Paper. He has taught at such colleges as Berry College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

His books include Defining the Wind, about the Beaufort Scale of wind force, and No-Man's Lands, about retracing the journey of Odysseus.

His most recent book, On the Grid, was his sixth. His work has been included in such compilations as Appalachian Adventure and in such anthologies as Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont, The Appalachian Trail Reader and Speed: Stories of Survival from Behind the Wheel.

For 2014-2015 Scott is a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, which is funding his work on the Lawson Trek, an effort to retrace the journey of explorer John Lawson through the Carolinas in 1700-1701.

He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, the writer June Spence, and their two sons.

More by Scott Huler

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