Firefighters in the Los Angeles Fire Department turned to a superhero-inspired solution to help locate a young boy trapped in a sewer pipe. Thirteen-year-old Jesse Hernandez fell into the pipe after walking on some wooden planks in an abandoned building. After that, it was a race against the clock to find his location.

"Survivability diminishes in that toxic environment," according to fireman Erik Scott. As such, the LAFD employed over 100 different firefighters to search the maze of over 2,400 feet of pipe in the local sewer system, a search that lasted almost 13 hours.

Since the hazardous environment prevented crews from wading in directly, firefighters strapped a camera to a flotation device, and used its signal along with other "Batman-like tools" to track the boy's location, identifying the handprints he left on the pipe walls along the way.

Hernandez was eventually found a mile east of where he accidentally entered the sewer pipe. Afterward, LAFD personnel gave him a cell phone to call his parents, obviously quite relieved.

Potential Preaching Angle: Don't you love the way the LAFD found a creative way to find and rescue a lost teenager? God also offers a creative way to find lost people—through the life, death, resurrection, and saving power of Jesus Christ. But God went one step further: he did wade into a hazardous environment for us and for our salvation.