Southern Water

was responsible for at least 29,494 sewage overflows in 2023
On average 80.8 times a day

These lasted for 317,284 hours (That's 36.72 years!) - in 816 different locations across their service area

2023 - By Water Company

How does each water company compare? These are the totals by company for each. The totals are really high, counting things in hours doesn't make it very easy to think about. Here we show how many years of continuous sewage dumps happened in a single year, by water company.

2023 - Asset Spill Duration Comparison

It isn't like there are just a few outliers... the problem exists across the entire estate of water assets. Here we show a 'cumulative frequency diagram' - where the number of CSOs that dumped sewage for a time, or longer, is shown. You can see that many CSOs dumped sewage into a river for months and months.

Southern Water is highlighted in the plot below

2023 - Worst Locations Southern Water

1. LAVANT WWTW

Chichester polluted for 6,542 hours, into River Lavant

286 incidents

That's 9.09 months.

5.5 times a week, on average

2. KINGS SOMBORNE WWTW

Romsey and Southampton North polluted for 4,995 hours, into River Test

239 incidents

That's 6.94 months.

4.6 times a week, on average

3. HAM LANE LEWES SETTLES STORM TANK

Lewes polluted for 4,830 hours, into Tidal River Ouse

243 incidents

That's 6.71 months.

4.7 times a week, on average

4. WEST WELLOW WWTW

Romsey and Southampton North polluted for 4,160 hours, into River Blackwater

194 incidents

That's 5.78 months.

3.7 times a week, on average

5. SANDOWN WWTW

Isle of Wight polluted for 4,000 hours, into English Channel

265 incidents

That's 5.56 months.

5.1 times a week, on average

6. CHICHESTER WWTW

Chichester polluted for 3,939 hours, into Chichester Harbour

227 incidents

That's 5.47 months.

4.4 times a week, on average

Water Companies

Data Sources & Accuracy

EDM (Event Duration Monitoring) data and Consented Discharges to Controlled Waters with Conditions from Environment Agency & Data Map Wales, and Scottish Water

Experimental derived data from Thames Water API, Some data may be missing or inaccurate. This uses Environment Agency rainfall data from the real-time data API (Beta) - Rainfall data is delayed by up to two days.

This website is intended to provide an accurate representation of the Environment Agency data. The data is hard to use, and thus some errors may have been made. If you find something that is incorrect, please raise an issue at the GitHub issues page and we'll endeavour to fix it quickly.

This project is not associated, approved or endorsed by any of the companies whose logos you see here.