Recent storm overflow activity
In order to help make a decision about using the water companies are required to publish details about the start and stop times of spills from Combined Storm Overflows. In the southwest SWW has designed WaterFit Live to provide information only on the latest spill and, despite repeated requests from ESCAPE, has declined to provide a more detailed history. We believe this is a danger to public health and this page is designed to show the recent history for Exmouth.
Think of a sewage spill like the old style electric hobs on a cooker, as soon as you turned them off they go back to black but are still dangerously hot if you put your hand on the plate. Todays modern hobs have lights that flash to alert you to a hot plate. A spill is similar because once the spill stops it takes time for the sewage to be diluted and disperse. We cannot have flashing lights. This is why we are calling on the government, regulators and the water companies to agree on a common standard safe alert time after the end of the spill. SAS uses 48 hours but SWW only allows 12.5 hours.
You need to know the recent history of spills and you need to know when the last spill ended in order to make an 'informed decision' about using the water.
Why does this matter?
Typically spills follow rainfall patterns they might start and stop several times each for a shorter period. So you may have a spill that lasts for 32 hours then as the rain eases it may stop and start for 10 minutes then two minutes. WaterFit will only show the last two minute spill so you might think this is not enough to affect water quality. You don't realise that in the last 48 hours untreated sewage has been discharged for over 32 hours.
ESCAPE is using information from the National Storm Overflow map based on data provided by SWW.
This is only a limited trial based on the Exmouth CSOs.