Live sewage discharges and storm overflow spills across all 9 UK water companies — Thames Water, Yorkshire Water, Severn Trent, United Utilities, Northumbrian Water, South West Water, Southern Water, Wessex Water and Anglian Water
England has a sewage crisis.
Every time it rains heavily, Victorian-era sewers can't cope. What happens next is legal — but it shouldn't be.
Sewage in our rivers
What is a CSO?
Combined Sewer Overflows are legal release valves built into the sewage network. During heavy rain, untreated sewage mixed with rainwater is discharged directly into rivers and coastal waters — with no treatment whatsoever.
The scale of the problem
How often does it happen?
English water companies recorded over 3.6 million hours of sewage spills in 2024 alone. That's one spill roughly every nine seconds — around the clock, every single day of the year.
What WaterWatch does
Real-time data. Every site.
We monitor all 13,664 discharge sites across all 9 UK water companies — detecting the exact moment a spill starts and ends, updated every 15 minutes from official EDM sensor networks.
Take action
Your river. Check it now.
See every active discharge near you. Get a free alert the moment a spill starts at a site you follow. Share the data. Hold water companies to account.
Why we exist
Environmental data that belongs to everyone.
Discharge records from 13,664 CSO sites across all 9 UK water companies are publicly available — reported through official EDM sensor networks, updated every 15 minutes. For most people, that data was invisible. WaterWatch makes it usable.
Real-time alerts. Site histories. River-level context. Weekly summaries. Every number comes from the source, presented clearly. Independent, transparent, and free for everyone.
By water company
Live sewage discharges by company
Each of the 9 UK water companies has its own live page with map, site directory and rankings.
New here?
Start with the basics, not the data
Before you dive into spill counts and discharge maps, it’s worth understanding why the headline numbers are often less meaningful than they look. The water industry explained — no jargon, no spin.
From the blog
