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(Page 1 of 1 pages for this article ) Tuesday, June 10, 2008Just Another Day…...when a lake disappears.
It started out as just another day. I was at my desk, fixing some broken links on a DVD I’m authoring. Then, the phone rang. The voice on the other end was one of our reporters, asking if I was available to do a shoot that afternoon sometime. Really, I wasn’t - it’s been pretty busy lately. “Haven’t you heard about Lake Delton?” (For the non-cheeseheads in the audience, Lake Delton is a man-made lake of about 260 acres in the middle of Wisconsin Dells, the summer family waterpark capitol of the Milky Way, if not the entire Universe. It is also about 40 miles north of Madison.) “Ummm, no...” “It burst its banks! It is draining out!” All this is true. You may have noticed that we in the upper Midwest have gotten prodigious, almost Biblical, amounts of rain in the last few weeks. And Lake Delton had apparently had enough, but instead of taking out the dam that created the lake in the first place, it pushed through a plug of land about 300 feet wide by 500 feet long, ripping out a road, sewers, electric lines and 5 houses. Luckily, no fatalities. Here’s a link to a Chicago Tribune article. But anyway, back to the phone… “I don’t know when, but we might get to hitch a ride with the Army Reserve to get some aerials...” Oooh, the magic word. I love flying. I love shooting while flying. And while I want to do a good job, sadly we at Wisconsin Public TV do not own a gyro-stabilized lens, and until you have shot aerials without one, you have no idea how jumpy that helicopter really is. But I’m getting ahead of myself… I figured that without a hard leave time, I could run out for lunch real quick. Bad move. I had no sooner paid for my burrito at Chipotle before my cell phone started vibrating. “We gotta be at the airport in 30 minutes!” I had the burrito for dinner, about 7 hours later. I ran back to the station, jumped in the truck, and we made it to the airport in about 35 minutes. Of course, then we waited for about another hour. Once all the formalities were out of the way, we went out to the tarmac, where an Army National Guard Blackhawk was warming up. As much as I love flying and shooting, I had some trepidation about this, since the last military helicopter I had worked in was a Vietnam-era Huey, which was about as stable a platform as an out-of-balance washing machine on high-speed spin. (And that time I actually had enough forewarning to rent a gyro lens!) But once I was strapped in and we were off, I was pleasantly surprised; the Blackhawk is a much smoother ride than the Huey. Not that it mattered. But again, I’m getting ahead of myself… We took off to the northwest, flying over Dane and Columbia counties, where water pooled in farmers fields like little oceans. In about 10 minutes we were in the Dells, and I had one of those really unsettling feelings of not realizing what I was seeing. Where there had been a mid-sized manmade lake, there was little more than brown mud. The breach in the land was much bigger than I had anticipated, and even at 1000’ altitude was plain to see. Several houses sat half-demolished - the sides towards the water had just disappeared and floated away down the Wisconsin River. We orbited the scene about a half-dozen times, at varying altitudes. I thought I had held the image pretty steady. Jeez, was I wrong. I was shooting with a Sony HDCam. That kind of footage doesn’t play in my decidedly HDV-level office, so today I got to see standard-def DVD down-rez copies. Jumpier than a box of bunnies on meth. Disappointed? You bet. Could I have done better? Not really, not in the situation I was handed. There’s a reason big-market TV stations lease helicopters with nose-mount gyrostabilized cameras - you get what you pay for. Many are the times I’ve wished for that kind of hardware to use, but it just isn’t in the cards for public TV, especially on short notice. So in this case, I have decided to grade on a curve. I’ll do what I can to do better next time, although honestly, I’m not sure what that might be. And the producer was thrilled to have the footage at all, so I guess that was a win. (Hot tip: With footage like this, slo-mo is your best friend.) Sometimes, the best you can do is just that - the best you can do.
(Page 1 of 1 pages for this article ) 
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