Here are all the CSOs in England, Wales & Scotland that 'overflowed' in 2023 - dumping raw or minimally treated sewage into fragile chalk streams, rivers, onto beaches and into shellfish areas
Each colour represents a different Water Company, the size of each dot relates to how long each overflow was polluting - where the monitoring is disabled we show a medium-sized dot.
The figures, supplied by the water companies themselves, understate the problem, as the data is poorly collected by the Water Companies, with monitoring defective or in many cases completely absent.
There is sewage overflowing into rivers in almost every constituency across England and Wales. A very few miss out, simply because they don’t have any Combined Sewage Overflows. CSOs mix toilet sewage with rainwater and then discharge it into rivers, creating a horrible environment for fish and other creatures - it poisons them, and the rivers die. You'll find all sorts of unsanitary sanitary products floating downstream.
Top of The Poops - Constituencies
Most, if not actually all, of the beaches and designated coastal bathing locations around England and Wales are regular recipients of a good layer of sewage.
Accuracy Warning We use data from the water companies, but we are seeing many anomalies, that make us believe that bathing location information is quite poor. The situation is likely far worse than reported here.
Water companies have a duty to report on the summer bathing season separately, and this made grim reading in 2022. For more details check out Surfers Against Sewage Water Quality Report 2022
Top of The Poops - Beaches
Of the 4700 rivers in England, few escape from sewage dumping
On the image, you can see a map, in blue of all the rivers that escaped sewage in 2023, and in brown all the rivers that received more than 24 hours of sewage dumps.
The 1100 or so rivers in Wales didn't escape, unfortunately, but Dwr Cymru don't include the information in their reports to enable us to draw the map very easily. Perhaps they will include it in 2023?
Top of The Poops - Rivers
Shellfish are sensitive to the quality of water that surrounds them, and as they filter the water, they can become contaminated with bacteria from the water around them.
