Senior design project fosters service to community

We are seniors in Biological Systems Engineering and this is our senior design project. So we're out in Bluefield, Virginia and we're working on a stormwater design for this neighborhood. One of the community members here has had up to five feet of water in his basement from Hurricane Helene. We're out here just trying to collect some data that we can take back and create some models so that we can try to get at the causes of the flooding. This is our second site visit and we are surveying the elevations of all of the inlets at each home and then the outlet down in the Bluestone River. When this neighborhood was built there was not a comprehensive design for stormwater management. Instead each home has kind of built their own drainage, inlets, and pipes. The water runs over a pipe that's designed to drain it to the Bluestone River it sort of overtops that pipe and then comes into this yard flows down this direction and actually pools in another person's yard downstream where we've seen a lot of that severe flooding and severe property damage. This is very similar to what we've been doing in courses throughout our time at Virginia Tech so we've learned how to design these structures and so now we get to really have a hands-on experience and get to do the work that we've been learning about we'll be able to have all that data and then input it into the software of our choice and then we'll be able to tell how much water each of the pipes that are already installed can handle and then redesign wherever those failures are happening. As a senior design project we get to embody the prosum of Virginia Tech that we can just come out here and serve. I think it's extra fulfilling because of the aspect of this project specifically that is that the homeowners are invested in that we get to really provide a solution to a problem that they're facing.