A Plume Looms in Bethpage: Animating maps for "real time"
For the last SWD of 2019 I wanted to challenge myself by visualizing a map and animating it. I decided to explore a topic that has sort of "loomed" over me a good chunk of my life. I wanted to learn more and this was a great way to do it. In my hometown, the drinking water has been compromised. An underground plume continues to grow a foot a day in central Long Island, NY. I tried my best to tell both sides of the story. Our town, NY State, and the military contractor that compromised the water all had their parts to play in the current state of affairs. I even left out some events out despite the already long timeline you see. The infographic content was built around my own questions when researching this topic: "What's in the plume?" "what are these chemicals and how'd they get there?" Here’s a summary of some of things I considered/ grappled with:
1. Hand drawn illustrations or not? I was tempted to leave them out this month because I know they can come off as kind of "whimsical" and "fun," but I tried reducing this by presenting them with a limited color palette. I find the watercolor and the historical nature of the illustrations lend themselves well to telling the story. But I'm open to any feedback has on this! I also used the opportunity to highlight some of the pretty big accomplishments of the military contractor. Our town is proud of these things too. If you drive into Bethpage you'll see "Home of the LEM" under "Welcome to Bethpage." It’s a complicated relationship to say the least. PS. The sign also claims "New York's best tasting tap water" which is a story for another day :).
2. The Map: All the existing plume maps have this giant only semi-transparent plume over the residential streets, making it hard to see the development of the area, I also find it to be a bit silly since the plume is in fact creeping under all of this development. I used Open Street Map to get a vector map and cleaned it up in illustrator. It was important to me to have the plume "loom" under the streets where people live. I kept and highlighted the surface water layer as a subtle nod to the water being contaminated underneath. If I had more time I would of liked to play around with a gradient in the plume, showing how the level of contamination fluctuates in some areas, but I’ll have to experiment with that another day.
3. “Real time” Data Animation: The map was actually inspired by a tweet I saw earlier this month from Neil Kaye. It’s a simple but brilliant “real time” animation of the deforestation of The Amazon. I really like how he uses animation as part of the data being explored and not just an eye-catching gimmick. Here are some other great examples of this: Sun Angle and UV Risk and Path of the sun on the winter solstice. So I was determined to try to animate something that would illustrate how something changes over time, and present new information.. While my map is not “real time” (32 years would be a real long time for any audience). It inspired me to show different views and emphasize what a “about foot a day” looks like in the bottom left-hand corner.
4. Comprehensive Timeline: It took a few hours of research to really get the “saga” down. Honestly, I still don’t know if I have it all right, and I know I left some things out. But this is the most comprehensive timeline out there. It’s long and maybe the design suffers a bit of it, but it was important to me to give this context to the reader.
Overall, I learned some important lessons about keeping your layers organized in illustrator, some neat tricks in After Effects and a lot more about something that is affecting several generations of my family.
Thanks for the opportunity SWD!
