Veolia Water flies drones through sewers instead of sending crews in

Water and wastewater services · Sewer and stormwater inspection · Vendor published

The job

Veolia Water inspects underground sewer collectors and wastewater assets where the old choices were human entry into contaminated confined spaces or tethered cameras that required cleaning the line first. Veolia was an early Elios adopter in 2016 and added an Elios 3 to its fleet in 2023; crews now fly collectors from access points, and the Elios 3 adds LiDAR so inspections produce 3D models that feed WinCan and GIS workflows. Service manager Julien Maj and operations lead Florent Fardel describe the drone as removing most confined space entry from this work.

The operation

Global water services provider; Elios user since 2016 with the fleet updated to Elios 3 in 2023 (published-by-vendor)

The equipment

Flyability Elios 2 and Elios 3 with 4K camera and LiDAR; Flyability Inspector software with WinCan and GIS integration

The published numbers

Most users of Elios drones in sewer networks benefit from a 40% reduction in inspection costs per linear meter (published-by-vendor, stated for Elios sewer users generally rather than as an audited Veolia figure); inspections twice as fast as conventional ITV methods, in part because collectors do not need cleaning before intervention (published-by-vendor, same general framing); adoption in 2016 and Elios 3 added in 2023 (published-by-vendor). Veolia-specific cost and time figures: not published. Payback: not published.

Where a source did not publish a figure, this entry says so rather than guessing.

What we would check before believing it applies to you

Read the percentages carefully: the 40% and 2x figures are the vendor's claims for its sewer users as a class, and the Veolia-specific content is qualitative, which is why they are marked that way here. The no-precleaning claim matters economically because jetting is often a large share of a CCTV program's cost, but confirm your regulator and condition-coding standard accept footage from uncleaned pipe. Verify the drone cage fits your access shafts and pipe diameters, and how video quality holds up in fog and high humidity, which are routine in live collectors. Confined space entry rarely disappears entirely; retrieval plans and gas policies still apply at the access points. Ask for sample deliverables in your coding format before assuming the output drops into existing asset management.

Sources