Mapping Sewage Discharges into rivers across England <!--and Wales-->

Realtime mapping the downstream impact of Combined Sewage Overflow discharge events in non-tidal rivers across England <!--and Wales-->. This repository provides the back-end for www.sewagemap.co.uk. The repository for the front-end is available at github.com/JonnyDawe/UK-Sewage-Map/.

This was developed by Alex Lipp, Jonny Dawe and Sudhir Balaji. Please feel free to raise an issue above or contact us directly.

• Installation
• Usage
• Output Data
  • Water Company Data Table
• Source Data

Installation

This script relies on the POOPy package which I (Alex) have created to allow easy interaction with Water Company Event Duration Monitoring (EDM) APIs, and analysis of the data. This is freely available at: github.com/AlexLipp/POOPy.

Usage

The core script is update_all.py which is called automatically every 15 minutes. This function, using POOPy functions, calculates a geoJSON file which contains the downstream impact of all active or recently active CSO spills for which EDM data is available. These are automatically uploaded to the Amazon Web Services bucket which hosts them. The data is then fronted using the CloudFront delivery service. The files are read by the www.sewagemap.co.uk front-end which visualises them.

The script update.py is included for legacy purposes, and updates only Thames Water data (but is needed for the historical data provided only by Thames).

Output data

The live downstream impact of Combined Sewage Overflow (CSO) discharge events is freely available under a CC-BY-SA license. The links in the table below give access to the data as .geoJSON files. The data are updated automatically every ~20 minutes (but the URL remains the same). These can be incorporated into your own projects, web-apps, or GIS projects but please attribute the source as www.sewagemap.co.uk. It'd be wonderful to hear about any projects you use this data in, so please do reach out to me to let me know, or if I can be of any assistance.

The Downstream impacted reaches is a LineString feature-collection simply showing the sections of a river which are downstream of current discharges, and optionally those in the last 48 hrs. These are the brown lines on www.sewagemap.co.uk.

The Downstream Impact Information is a Point feature-collection which details at each pixel in a drainage network 1) the number of discharges upstream, 2) the number of discharges per unit of upstream area, and 3) A list of the names (or permit numbers) of discharging CSOs upstream.

Water Company Data Table

Disclaimer: whilst we make every effort to ensure the accuracy of this data, we cannot guarantee it and it should not be used for any critical purposes.

Water Company | Downstream Impacted Reaches | Downstream Impact Information | Last Updated --- | --- | --- | --- Thames Water | Current spills; Spills within last 48hrs | Current spills; Spills within last 48hrs | Timestamp Anglian Water | Current spills; Spills within last 48hrs | Current spills; Spills within last 48hrs | Timestamp United Utilities | Current spills; Spills within last 48hrs | Current spills; Spills within last 48hrs | Timestamp Southern Water | Current spills; Spills within last 48hrs | Current spills; Spills within last 48hrs | Timestamp Northumbrian Water | Current spills; Spills within last 48hrs | Current spills; Spills within last 48hrs | Timestamp Severn Trent Water | Current spills; Spills within last 48hrs | Current spills; Spills within last 48hrs | Timestamp Wessex Water | Current spills; Spills within last 48hrs | Current spills; Spills within last 48hrs | Timestamp Yorkshire Water | Current spills; Spills within last 48hrs | Current spills; Spills within last 48hrs | Timestamp SouthWest Water | Current spills; Spills within last 48hrs | Current spills; Spills within last 48hrs | Timestamp <!--Welsh Water | Current spills; Spills within last 48hrs | Current spills; Spills within last 48hrs | Timestamp-->

Thames Water historical data

We process the Thames Water historical spill API which records stop/start event histories and store it as a table of discharge events with attributes suc as StartTime and Duration. You can get this data (in .json format) for discharge events here and for offline periods here.

Source data

The live EDM data which we use to map downstream sectons is sourced, in England, from the Stream Storm Overflow Data Hub which is provided under a CC-BY license. Each individual water company maintain's an individual API which you can access from the given link. <!-- For Wales, we use data presented on the WelshWater Storm Overflow map.-->