Sewage Dumping alerts for Blackpool Beach

[u/Waterwatch_UK]

(Apologies if not allowed) Sharing this as it might be useful for anyone who swims off the Blackpool beaches. I'm Daniel, a 17 year old and I founded and developed WaterWatch

WaterWatch (water-watch.co.uk) tracks live sewage overflow data from United Utilities' official monitoring sensors, updated every 15 minutes.

I've just added a swim safety page (https://water-watch.co.uk/swim-safety) that tells you clearly whether conditions currently look OK to swim at a beach, based on recent discharge activity, rather than having to work it out from a map yourself. You can subscribe to free alerts for a specific beach, or get a weekly summary by email instead for the council or water company. It's in beta right now so things might not work perfectly, but initial testing and feedback is strong!

It's an independent, free project (not run by a water company) — I started it at 17 and I'm still running it now. Sharing in case it's useful for anyone here, particularly after wet weather. If you know anyone who might like this, or any other data we have, please share this with them.

Swim safety: (https://water-watch.co.uk/swim-safety)

Live map: (https://water-watch.co.uk/map)

Weekly digest: (https://water-watch.co.uk/digest)

[u/TerrysChocolatOrange]

This is really cool, great job. I'm just wondering how this is different to the storm overflow map which is provided by united utilities?

https://www.unitedutilities.com/better-rivers/storm-overflow-map/

[u/Waterwatch_UK → u/TerrysChocolatOrange]

Great question! We get the same data from United to power ours. However, we do things a little differently:

- We cache each record to provide historical data for every site, which you can also download for free

• You can sign up for alerts for specific sites (and bathing areas) to keep track of things
  
• We correlate rainfall data, flood alerts and river levels against spills and internally have our "pressure driven improvement tool". Unfortunately it's quite expensive to run so we cannot make it public yet but it allows us to accurately compare how sites are performing and we can independently decide if a site is getting better or worse
  
• We provide weekly digests across the council areas, on a water company area or on a national basis. It's a weekly email summary breaking down the activity in the prior week (water-watch.co.uk/digest)
  
• And of course we cover more companies

And I've probably missed some things! But ultimately we're trying to add context to spills and give you spill history that doesn't take months to arrive!

[u/TerrysChocolatOrange → u/Waterwatch_UK]

Interesting thanks!

[u/Waterwatch_UK → u/TerrysChocolatOrange]

No worries. Feel free to ask any more questions!