Wire Hazard Map
United States & Canada

Of the 1,475 NTSB wire-strike accident sites we analyzed, roughly 600 have no wire in any public dataset — farm lines, service drops, cables strung across a slough. No utility file, no chart, and no map (including this one) knows they exist. Pilot reports are the only way that class ever gets charted.

Email a wire report ([email protected], subject "WIRE REPORT") with: where — coordinates if you can, otherwise the water or strip name and a description; estimated height above the water or ground; when you saw it; and a photo if you got one safely. Reports are verified against aerial imagery and LiDAR before anything ships; verified wires appear as PILOT pins on this map and in the packs. Your report may be the only record of that wire anywhere.

Each pack installs as toggleable map layers. On the device with ForeFlight, open this page in Safari, then long-press a ForeFlight link and choose Open in "ForeFlight" (a normal tap can land on a page that looks like a 404 — swipe down and tap the banner). Packs exclude single-source unverified distribution lines and expire ~6 months after build — reinstall for updates. The plain kml works in Google Earth, Garmin Pilot and AvPlan.

Regions not listed have no wire-over-water crossings in any open source we ingest yet — notably Nunavut (isolated community diesel grids; no open utility GIS) and the Aleutian Islands west of the antimeridian. No listing does not mean no wires.

Open data: the raw datasets (crossings, spans, the NTSB+TSB wire-strike record, MET towers, cableways, ag section briefs) are downloadable as gzipped GeoJSON with an attribution README at mrb.sh/wires-tiles/open-data/.

Crossings are geometric intersections of power-line vectors with water (OpenStreetMap water polygons ≥ 5 ha and river centerlines); duplicates across sources are merged (60 m, then a voltage-keyed 120 m pass) and cross-checked against the FAA Daily Digital Obstacle File (August 6, 2026), filtered to wires over water. Confidence: A = 2+ independent sources, B = single government source, C = single OSM transmission line. The "Coverage" column above shows which kinds of sources fire in each region — "OSM only" and "HIFLD + OSM" regions have no state/provincial government layer yet and are the least complete. See a wire we're missing? Email [email protected].

Lidar validation. Every US "possible crossing" (a mapped line whose geometry stops at the water's edge) is checked against aerial lidar — USGS 3DEP in the US, NRCan CanElevation point clouds in Canada: we pull the point cloud over the adjacent open water and look for elevated, linearly-arranged returns — the signature of a conductor hanging over the surface. A hit upgrades the pin to lidar-verified (dark red, and an amber WIRE placemark in the pack); a clean sweep is only a reduced-concern note, never a green light — thin or low wires evade lidar, and many rural areas have sparse or no coverage (3051 confirmed / 7685 clear / 1974 bridge-or-structure / 14394 insufficient lidar of 27,104 checked so far; Canada has no equivalent open point-cloud service yet).

Non-powerline cables. Two hazard classes no utility dataset will ever contain: cable ferries (a ferry cable stretched across a river or narrows at or just above the water surface — from the government operator inventories of BC, AB, SK, ON, QC, the Maritimes and US state/county ferries) and aerial cableways over water (gondolas, cable cars, zip lines and industrial conveyors that span water — swept from OpenStreetMap). Both render as blue pins. A cable ferry crossing is lethal to a seaplane on the landing or takeoff run; treat the whole reach around the ferry line as unusable.

Integrated datasets

Derived data © Saint Bernard Aerial, ODbL. Contains information from © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL) and public-domain US federal / OGL-BC sources. Data current as of August 6, 2026. Built 26.0806.