Drone Leak Investigation · Government & Municipal
Reservoir & Dam Seepage Detection by drone.
Thermal and visual reconnaissance of earthen dams, dikes, reservoirs, and embankments — seepage exit points, wet zones on downstream faces, and anomalous vegetation mapped without crews walking unstable slopes.
Free phone consult · No pressure · Mon–Sat 8am–6pm PT
Why owners and operators choose it
- Finds seepage expression before it becomes visible saturation
- Repeatable georeferenced baselines for dam-safety files
- No personnel on steep, wet, or unstable faces
- Complements — never replaces — your engineer's inspection program
Built for
How the investigation runs
- 1
Structure briefing
Drawings, prior inspection reports, and known wet areas frame the survey. We coordinate with the owner's dam-safety engineer so the data lands inside their existing surveillance program.
- 2
Thermal face mapping
Groundwater and seepage water hold a stable temperature year-round while surfaces swing with the weather — exit points and wet zones contrast clearly in the right window. The full downstream face, abutments, and toe are mapped in one flight.
- 3
Visual + vegetation pass
High-resolution visual imagery captures the classic secondary indicators: preferentially green vegetation strips, cattail colonisation, soft-ground texture, and animal-burrow activity along the toe.
- 4
Georeferenced report
Thermal anomalies and visual indicators plotted on the structure, compared against any previous survey, and delivered in a format your engineer-of-record can take straight into the surveillance file.
Aerial screening + ground confirmation, one company
The aerial survey ranks where the problems are; Leak.ca's ground crews — the same team pinpointing BC leaks since 1999 — confirm them with acoustic correlation, moisture probing, and flood testing where the finding warrants it. One accountable report from first flight to repair-ready coordinates, instead of two vendors pointing at each other.
Frequently asked
How does thermal imaging find seepage on a dam?
Seepage water originates underground, where temperature is stable — roughly 8–12 °C in much of BC — while the embankment surface follows air temperature. In warm weather a seep reads cold against the face; in cold snaps it reads warm. Flown in the right contrast window, exit points and saturated zones stand out measurably, including early-stage wet areas a walking inspection can miss.
Does this replace our dam safety inspections?
No, and we will not pretend otherwise. BC dam owners operate under the Dam Safety Regulation with defined surveillance obligations run by their engineer-of-record. What we provide is reconnaissance data — full-face, repeatable, georeferenced — that makes those inspections better targeted, and a safe way to look at faces and toes that are hazardous to walk.
Can you survey dikes and flood embankments too?
Yes — linear flood-protection works are ideal drone subjects: long, uniform, and tedious to walk. Kilometres of dike face and toe are mapped per flight day, with anomalies geotagged for follow-up. Post-freshet and post-storm baselines are the common triggers in BC.
What do you deliver to our engineer?
Radiometric thermal mosaics and visual orthophotos of the faces and toe, an annotated anomaly register with RTK coordinates, and comparison against any prior baseline we hold. Raw radiometric files are included on request so the engineer's team can run their own analysis.
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