Chunked and ready for outreach: Liquid Assets primer on U.S. water woes

Originally published in Current, Sept. 29, 2008
By Katy June-Friesen

When Penn State Public Broadcasting (WPSU) began producing Liquid Assets, a first-hand, often subterranean, look at the country’s aging water infrastructure, execs weren’t aiming for a national primetime broadcast.

Crew gathers footage in
Pennsylvania for Liquid Assets.

WPSU’s goal was a TV documentary/outreach package that communities could use when and where they wanted. “We want our content to be as available and as accessible as possible,” says Ted Krichels, g.m.. The result: a public education campaign that citizens may or may not encounter through a public TV station.

With profiles of 10 cities across the country, Liquid Assets takes viewers into pipes and sewers to examine how drinking water, wastewater and storm-water systems work, when they were built and the challenges cities face to keep it working.

Liquid Assets will be available to public TV stations Oct. 1 through the National Educational Telecommunications Association. WPSU is sending 13,000 DVDs to municipalities across the country. The program’s website will offer a toolkit for community discussions. Twelve stations will receive grants to help support outreach.

Sunil Sinha, then a civil engineering professor at Penn State, laid out the nationwide problem to WPSU executives about three years ago: The water infrastructure was in trouble, but people didn’t know. The problem was literally out of sight.

The program visits cities around the country to show the health risks of unsafe drinking water, the environmental threats of unsustainable water practices, the neglected maintenance of waterworks, and the cost of rehabilitating them. To put Liquid Assets in the hands of people who might not encounter it otherwise — including key decision-makers — WPSU has created a web of 19 funding and outreach partners. The Colcom Foundation, based in Pittsburgh and focused on environmental sustainability, provided most of the program’s nearly $500,000 budget.

ther production funders include the American Society of Civil Engineers, Associated General Contractors of America and the Environmental & Water Resources Institute.

Colcom, ASCE and a cast of 16 other diverse but water-related groups contributed about $300,000 for outreach.

As Liquid Assets’ primary outreach partner, ASCE connected WPSU to the engineering profession, lending credibility to outreach efforts, according to Melanie Doebler, project director and director of public engagement for WPSU.

Local ASCE chapters already have helped promote the doc and are planning events and forums in their communities. At The Great Reno Balloon Race in Reno, Nev., earlier this month, the local ASCE chapter previewed footage from the doc at its booth and handed out Liquid Assets T-shirts.

To make the high-definition film, a three-person crew of a producer, director and videographer visited Atlanta; Boston; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; Milwaukee; New York City; Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Washington, D.C.; and the small town of Herminie, Pa., which is now creating its first-ever sewage system.

In Atlanta, Mayor Shirley Franklin — who prides herself on being the “sewer mayor” — has led efforts to improve the city’s dangerously old and ailing water infrastructure. She hired an outreach team to educate people about the dire risks to the region, successfully advocated higher water prices, and helped institute a 1-cent sales tax to help pay for repairs. The city also works with environmental groups that monitor the health of the Chattahoochee River, which has swallowed overflow sewage for decades. Since Franklin began agitating, the city has reduced overflow by nearly 50 percent.

People who work in the water industry welcomed the filmmakers, even when they’re exposing their cities’ problems, because public works professionals want to educate people, says Doebler.

Liquid Assets is chunked into 15 chapters such as “Los Angeles: Protecting the Beaches” and “Finding the Funds,” which allows easy access for online on-demand as well as DVD viewers, though Krichels says they don’t yet have plans to put the program on the Web. For now, WPSU is focused on garnering eyeballs via the DVD, which includes a four-minute preview and 16-minute overview in addition to the full-length program. The companion toolkit, nearly 25 pages, includes community discussion guides and suggests partner organizations (including pubTV stations) for hosting screenings and discussions. An event-planning checklist, moderator guidelines and a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of the program is also included.

In Kansas City, KCPT is airing Liquid Assets and integrating portions of the doc into a companion broadcast about local infrastructure issues. The area ASCE chapter plans to host a Liquid Assets watch party and panel discussion and also organize a political forum with the master’s of public administration program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

The Liquid Assets project model is made possible in part by WPSU’s university connection, Krichels acknowledges, and the station has benefited from various relationships with Penn State’s departments and professors. With help from a recent CPB Local Service Initiative grant, WPSU is working with Wisconsin Public TV, based at the University of Wisconsin, and WOSU, at Ohio State University, to develop “University Place,” where university licensees can create a shared repository of educational or public-service content that other stations could also tap into.

“We all know we are moving from this broadcast-center-out model into much more of an engagement model,” says Krichels, and increasingly the broadcast is not the end game. Public media’s goal, he says, should be to facilitate ongoing conversations.