Young adults by day, genius water heroes by night.

A Pennsylvania teenager helped restore the bioswales in his Ohiopyle, Pennsylvania community. Bioswales are landscape elements along streets that collect and purify stormwater runoff.

The 30 bioswales in Peter Livengood’s community had become run down and useless. As part of his Eagle scout project, Peter developed a plan, raised nearly $25,000 in money and donated items and got a team of volunteers together to repair all the community's bioswales. In all, his project took 1,977 man-hours, including 586 hours of his own time.

To be sure this doesn’t happen again, Peter wrote a step-by-step maintenance plan and assisted the city in hiring a maintenance person to perform those duties.

Elsewhere, two Syracuse University students are using saris and high-tech water equipment to bring clean drinking water to a neighborhood in Mumbai, India.

Through the University’s Invent@SU program, roommates Nikita Chatterjee and Brianna Howard used advanced water filters. The young ladies’ filtration system kept the saris to maintain a degree of familiarity to the locals’ previous filtration system. When the filters are no longer useful, a henna dye “X” appears, signaling “stop.”

Nikita and Brianna co-founded PAANI, which works to bring clean drinking water to a neighborhood in Mumbai, India. The idea of PAANI is to use locally available resources to solve the neighborhood’s contaminated drinking water problem.

They may not wear capes, but super heroes truly do walk among us.

Photo credit: Syracuse University (https://falk.syr.edu) and Bryan on Scouting (https://blog.scoutingmagazine.org).