Live water warnings

What these warnings mean

Advice against bathing is the Environment Agency's daily pollution risk forecast for designated bathing waters in England. It is only issued in the bathing season, from 15 May to 30 September. It is the official advice: when it is in force, the forecast is that the water may be polluted that day, usually after heavy rain.

A storm overflow lets diluted sewage out of the sewer into a river or the sea when the system is overloaded, usually in heavy rain. Water companies must publish when one starts discharging within an hour. "Discharging now" means its monitor shows it operating; "last 48 hours" means it stopped within the last two days.

Monitors show when an overflow is operating. They don't measure what reaches a beach, and tide, currents and distance all matter. An overflow on a river miles inland can matter more than one nearby that discharges far out to sea. So the official forecast is the verdict, and the overflow map is context.

Downstream zones

Many people in the water aren't bathing at a beach: they're fishing, paddling, swimming in a river or walking the dog downstream. So the map also shades where the water from an active overflow is likely to go. We trace each overflow down the river it discharges into, using Ordnance Survey's river network and its direction of flow:

• Discharging now: up to 10 km downstream, strongest at the outfall and fading with distance.
• Stopped in the last 48 hours: up to 5 km, weaker, fading out as the 48 hours pass.
• Where the river reaches the sea within that distance, a patch around the mouth, because that's often a beach.
• On tidal water (estuaries and the tidal reaches of rivers), the incoming tide can push it back upstream, so the shading also runs up to 6 km upstream and into the tidal creeks it passes, fading as it goes. It stops at the tidal limit, where Ordnance Survey's river data says the tide ends: above that, rivers only flow one way. How far a tide really carries water depends on the tide and the estuary, so 6 km is our estimate for a big tide.
• Straight into the sea: a patch around the outfall. Outfalls into an estuary follow the estuary channel both ways instead.

This is a Wild Days estimate, not a measurement. Nobody measures where the sewage actually goes, and river flow, rain, tides and the size of the discharge all change it. Use it as a reason to look again, not as a verdict.

Bathing water classifications (Excellent, Good, Sufficient, Poor) come from four years of samples taken through each bathing season.

What the map covers

Live storm overflows for every water company in England. Wales and Scotland are coming: Welsh Water's live data isn't published in a form we can use yet, and Scotland is being added. Bathing waters and their daily forecasts are England's for now.

Each beach page on Wild Days has its own water quality card with the overflows nearby and last year's spill record.

Sources

• Storm overflow data from Anglian Water, Northumbrian Water, Severn Trent Water, South West Water, Southern Water, Thames Water, United Utilities, Wessex Water and Yorkshire Water through Stream (CC BY 4.0).
• Bathing water data © Environment Agency, Open Government Licence v3.0.
• Downstream zones are a Wild Days estimate traced along OS Open Rivers. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database rights 2026.
• Annual spill records: produced by The Rivers Trust. © Environment Agency copyright and/or database right. © Dŵr Cymru/Welsh Water. © Hafren Dyfrdwy. Open Government Licence.