Water & sewer
with the details that matter.
Treatment plants, pump stations, basins, and collection infrastructure. We pair the capture method to the way your team will use the result.
What needs to be
measured first?
Treatment plants are the definition of hard to remeasure: wet, confined, partly buried, and expanded three times since the original drawings. One thorough capture with documented coverage replaces repeated visits, and aerial mapping ties basins, yards, and outfalls into the same control network.
Every facility has a different risk surface. We start with access, geometry density, and the decision the capture needs to unlock — then choose between laser scanning, drone mapping, or both.
Talk through a scope- Treatment basins
- Pump stations
- Blower rooms
- Pipe galleries
- Wet wells
- Outfalls
Capturing a treatment plant that stays in service
Treatment plants are wet, partly buried, permanently in service, and usually three expansions past their original drawings. The capture sequence works from the dry and accessible toward the confined and permitted, because the permit-dependent areas are the ones that need everything else already planned.
Site, yards, and outfalls
Aerial mapping of the whole plant — basin layout, roads, yards, laydown, and outfall structures — tied to ground control. This gives every later capture a site-wide frame and covers the areas that are simply awkward to walk with a tripod.
Process buildings and galleries
Blower rooms, MCC and control rooms, chemical feed buildings, dewatering, and the pipe galleries connecting them. Dry, accessible, and dense: this is where most of the mechanical and electrical scope of a plant upgrade actually lands.
Basins and channels above the waterline
Basin walls, walkways, weirs, launders, clarifier mechanisms, baffles, and channel geometry down to the water surface. What sits below the water is not visible to any optical instrument, so basins in service are captured to the waterline and no further.
Dewatered structures
When a basin, channel, or tank is drained for maintenance, the floor, inverts, and submerged mechanism become visible for the first time in years. These windows are short, they are announced by your maintenance schedule rather than ours, and they are the most valuable capture on the site.
Wet wells, pump stations, and vaults
Pump station interiors, wet wells, valve vaults, and headworks below grade, all under confined space procedure. Access here is a permit exercise with an attendant and monitoring, so it is planned as its own operation rather than as an extension of the walk-around.
Confined space, gas monitoring, and plant redundancy
The hazards on a treatment site are unlike anywhere else we work. Below-grade structures are confined spaces requiring permits, continuous atmospheric monitoring, an attendant, and retrieval arrangements, and hydrogen sulfide risk means those procedures are followed literally rather than approximately. Surfaces are wet and biologically contaminated, walkways over open basins need fall protection discipline, and equipment that goes into these areas is decontaminated afterwards. All of that is arranged with the plant's own safety staff, whose procedures govern.
The plant also cannot stop. Treatment continues while the survey happens, which means structures come out of service one at a time on a schedule driven by redundancy and by regulatory discharge obligations. The realistic plan captures everything accessible in one mobilization and treats dewatered structures as opportunities to be taken when the plant offers them — which sometimes means a short return visit timed to a maintenance drain rather than an extended first visit.
More on how this works in practice is on our guide to scanning without a shutdown.
What plant upgrades and capital projects need
Public utility work has a procurement dimension alongside the engineering one. Deliverables have to be reviewable and archivable as well as accurate, and existing conditions drawings often carry more weight in the file than the cloud they came from.
| The decision | What to ask for | Why that one |
|---|---|---|
| Plant upgrade or expansion design | Point cloud plus existing conditions drawing set | Engineers designing around three decades of expansion need measurable plans and sections they can draw on. |
| Equipment or mechanism replacement | Dense cloud with a modeled equipment zone | Fit, anchor positions, and access for the replacement are settled with solids in the immediate area only. |
| Hydraulic and process modeling inputs | Measured structure geometry and elevations | Weir, channel, and basin dimensions feed a hydraulic model your process engineer builds and owns. |
| Site civil and stormwater work | Aerial surface model, contours, and volumes | Grading, drainage, and access decisions are made at site scale from a current surface. |
Formats and what each one is good for are covered on the deliverables page.
Where treatment plant surveys fall short
- Expecting geometry below the water — An optical instrument stops at the water surface, and no amount of scanning changes that. Submerged floors, inverts, and mechanisms require the structure to be dewatered, or a different method entirely — and that has to be understood while the scope is being written, not afterwards.
- Assuming buried pipe is included — Underground piping and its connections are not visible to a surface scan, and locating them is subsurface work we do not perform. Where a project needs both, a locating or CCTV contractor covers the buried scope and their findings get surveyed into the same coordinate system as the plant capture.
- Missing the dewatering window — A basin drained for maintenance is a once-in-years opportunity to record geometry that is otherwise permanently submerged. Those windows are announced with little notice, and a survey scoped as a single fixed visit will usually miss them.
- Underestimating the permit overhead — Every below-grade entry carries a permit, an attendant, monitoring, and often a rescue plan, and each one takes far longer than the capture inside it. A schedule built on scanning speed rather than entry procedure will be wrong by a wide margin.
Questions from utilities and their engineers
Can you scan a basin that is in service?
The structure above the waterline, yes — walls, walkways, weirs, launders, and the mechanism where it sits above water. Everything below the surface is invisible to the instrument. If the submerged geometry matters to the project, the honest options are capturing during a planned dewatering or using a method suited to underwater measurement, which is a different discipline.
Do you enter wet wells and vaults?
Under your confined space program, with permits, atmospheric monitoring, an attendant, and retrieval arrangements in place. These entries are planned as their own operation with your safety staff rather than treated as an extension of the walk-around, and the time they take is scheduled honestly rather than optimistically.
Can you locate our buried piping?
No — that is ground-penetrating radar and electromagnetic locating work, which needs different equipment and different qualifications, and we do not perform it. What we do well is tie a locating contractor's markouts into the same control network as the plant capture, so the buried and above-grade information ends up in one coordinated model.
Will the deliverable suit a public procurement file?
If the requirement is stated up front, yes. Public projects usually want existing conditions drawings in specified formats alongside the cloud, plus a report stating the control used, the residuals, the coordinate system, and what could not be captured. That last item matters more on a treatment plant than almost anywhere else, because so much of the site is genuinely inaccessible.
Pair TLS interiors with drone exteriors for one coordinate story.
Roof, yard, tanks, structures, and the building envelope can live in the same project handoff when the control is planned upfront.
See existing conditionsMake the invisible
measurable.
Tell us what is inside, outside, and on the line. We will help you scope the capture and the handoff — in New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut.
Request a scan quote