FIRSTHAND STORIES WITH ANTHONY VELTRI
Nobody Asked.
Anyways, here’s what happened.
Hurricanes. An ash cloud. A 1790 farmhouse. A truck bought on eBay that ended up responding to Hurricane Katrina.
These are stories from places I’ve worked, situations I didn’t exactly plan for, and people I still remember years later. Along the way, I took photographs & videos. Sometimes, I remembered to turn the camera on, too.
Some stories involve national emergencies. Others involve discovering what the previous owner of your house considered an acceptable repair.
Nobody asked. I already had the pictures out.
Anyways, here’s what happened.
A few stories to start with.
A nameplate at Hoover Dam. A truck from eBay. A volcano with terrible timing. Pick whichever one makes you curious.
Somebody put their name on it.
At Hoover Dam, a small maintenance nameplate caught my attention. Years later, I’m still thinking about the person whose name was on it.
So I bought a truck on eBay.
It became a mobile mapping lab. Then Hurricane Katrina happened, and the truck became part of a much bigger story.
The volcano wasn’t on the itinerary.
An Icelandic ash cloud stranded me in Vienna while a multinational exercise was waiting in Kyiv. Getting there became its own operation.
Pick a story.
Start wherever something catches your eye. Each story stands on its own. There’s no required reading, and nobody’s checking whether you learned anything.
You Remember My Values, But Not Yours
Hoover Dam Lessons: “Proudly Maintained By Mike E.”
Bay St. Louis: Trust Before Logos After Hurricane Katrina
Stranded in Vienna, Responsible in Kyiv
Culture As Invisible Spec: Training A Media Specialist For Wildland Fire
Human Contracts Under The Air Picture
Respect The Envelope: Why Legal Is Not Always Safe
Gates That Matter: Task Books, Checkrides And Real Safety
Interfaces Break First: Designing For Partial Truth
Golden Datasets: The Tracks Everyone Trusts
Flying The Picture: What A Little Cessna Taught Me About Mission Systems
Living With Incomplete Pictures: Notes From High Tempo Systems
Disaster Response Staging Areas Are The Wrong Time To Start Trust
When Data And Applications Divorce: Separating The Two Without Tearing The System Apart
When You Cannot Force Compliance: iCAV and the Federated View of Critical Infrastructure
When You Choose Integration over Federation On Purpose
About the voice: “Nobody Asked” nods to the deli-counter storytellers I grew up around. Somebody’s holding court, the story is already underway, and whoever’s in the room is part of it. “Anyways” is how the storyteller picks up the thread and keeps going, unbothered. My scientific and professional writing has its own register. Here, I write closer to how I tell these stories out loud.