HDD bore planning & pre-bid risk intelligence software
Draw your bore corridor and get back a defensible packet of subsurface risk evidence: real driller-reported ground conditions to 25 ft, karst and bedrock context, wetland and contamination exposure, and transmission utility conflicts.
One bad bore costs more than a year of BoreCast.
Founding Pro: $199/month. Unlimited point & corridor checks.
One pass of a BoreCast corridor analysis: geology from real well logs, hazards flagged before bid day, every call documented.
BoreCast is horizontal directional drilling software for the stage where jobs are actually won or lost: the bid. Draw your bore corridor on a map and get back a defensible packet of subsurface risk evidence - real driller-reported ground conditions to 25 ft, karst and bedrock context, wetland and contamination exposure, and transmission utility conflicts.
Built on DrillerDB's 15.7 million state well records, BoreCast replaces guesswork with the closest thing to ground truth that exists before a geotech crew shows up - and it is honest about what it doesn't know, returning explicit confidence bands and "unknown" gaps instead of manufactured certainty.
Click a point or draw your bore path. Get a depth-by-depth subsurface profile to 25 ft with explicit confidence bands - and honest 'unknown' where the evidence is thin.
Freeze the subsurface evidence you bid on as a tamper-evident, hash-stamped PDF. If conditions are disputed later, you can prove what the data showed on bid day.
A pre-work compliance packet - methodology, findings, utility conflict assessment, and attestation - built to satisfy carrier pre-work diligence requirements.
KMZ files for the foreman's tablet, corridor PDF reports for the GC, plus rig, tooling, and drilling fluid recommendations matched to the expected ground.
Most directional boring jobs are bid with little more than a site walk, a one-call ticket, and experience. That works until it doesn't: an unexpected cobble layer doubles tooling wear, shallow bedrock forces a redesign mid-job, or a frac-out surfaces drilling fluid into a wetland and turns a profitable crossing into a cleanup and a violation. The contractors who consistently make money on HDD are the ones who price that risk before they sign, not after they hit it.
A real pre-bid site investigation answers four questions. First, what is the ground? Soil survey maps only describe the top few feet; the 4-25 ft window where HDD actually lives is documented almost exclusively in water well logs, where drillers recorded what they hit foot by foot. Second, where can fluid escape? Frac-out risk concentrates in coarse gravels, fractured and karst rock, shallow cover, and stream crossings - and the consequences depend on what sits above the bore. Third, what can the bore hit? Utility strikes are the most expensive failure mode in the industry, and high-pressure gas transmission lines are the ones that kill. Fourth, can you prove what you knew? When conditions differ from the bid assumptions, the contractor with documented pre-bid evidence is in a fundamentally stronger position than the one with a memory of a site walk.
BoreCast compresses that investigation from days of manual records research into minutes - and packages the output as artifacts you can attach to a bid, hand to a foreman, or show an insurance carrier.
Every layer in BoreCast earns its place by changing a bid number, a fluid plan, or a go/no-go decision.
Real lithology from 15.7M state well records. Soil survey products stop around 6.5 ft; HDD bores run to 25 ft. Well logs are the only public data that describes what drillers actually hit in that window - cobble, boulders, flowing sand, weathered rock.
Shallow rock changes everything: tooling, penetration rate, steering, and whether the bore is even feasible at the planned depth. BoreCast layers state geological survey bedrock data with nearest-well evidence.
Voids, sinkholes, and lost circulation zones make karst the classic HDD nightmare. The USGS national karst map flags carbonate, evaporite, and volcanic karst before you price the crossing.
USFWS National Wetlands Inventory and USGS hydrography overlays show exactly where an inadvertent return would land you in regulated waters - the difference between a cleanup and a violation.
Superfund and high-risk hazardous waste sites near the alignment. Drilling fluid migration through contaminated ground creates liability most bids never price in.
Plasticity index and steel/concrete corrosivity from NRCS soil survey data, weighted across the bore window - signals for reaming behavior, fluid plans, and product pipe selection.
Static water levels from nearby wells indicate hydrostatic pressure on the bore and the likelihood of a wet, unstable pilot hole.
Cross bore screening against 126,000+ HIFLD natural gas transmission, electric transmission, and crude oil pipeline segments, with DOT Part 192/195 encroachment flags.
Utility screening note: This is a transmission-level screen using public HIFLD data. Distribution lines (local gas, water, sewer) are NOT included. 811 locates remain legally required before any dig.
Differing site conditions claims usually come down to one question: what was knowable when the price was set? Without documentation, that argument is your word against the owner's. Evidence Lock settles it by freezing the full subsurface evidence packet - observations, derived profile, confidence bands, and the explicitly-marked unknowns - into a timestamped PDF sealed with a cryptographic hash watermarked on every page.
The Insurance Pre-Work Compliance Report goes a step further: a five-part packet (cover, methodology, findings, utility conflict assessment, attestation) designed to document pre-work diligence for insurance carriers - useful both for satisfying policy pre-work language and for demonstrating a standard of care if a claim ever lands.
Honest gaps are part of the protection. Because BoreCast marks low-evidence intervals as unknown instead of papering over them, the record shows you assessed the risk responsibly - it never overstates what the data could support.
One avoided bad bore pays for years of BoreCast. Run your next crossing through it before you sign the number.
Get Started with BoreCast