UK Storm Overflow & River Pollution Live Monitor

Near-real-time tracker for sewage storm-overflow discharges across nine major English water companies, built entirely on official, public, keyless data - no scraping, no browser, no login.

What it does

Every English water company now publishes its own live "Event Duration Monitoring" (EDM) feed showing, outfall by outfall, whether a storm overflow is currently discharging into a river, lake or the sea. These are the same official feeds that back the water industry's own near-real-time "National Storm Overflow Hub" (streamwaterdata.co.uk, backed by Water UK, the Environment Agency, Defra and Ofwat).

This Actor:

1. Aggregates nine companies into one feed - Anglian Water, Northumbrian Water, South West Water, Severn Trent Water, Yorkshire Water, Wessex Water, Thames Water, United Utilities and Southern Water - by resolving each company's live ArcGIS Feature Service from its stable item id and querying only the outfalls whose status changed inside your lookback window.
2. Tracks changes, not just a snapshot - every run compares the current status of each outfall against what the Actor saw last time (stored in its own key-value store) and labels each row new_discharge_start, ongoing_discharging, discharge_stopped, or first-seen. Nothing else public turns the raw company feeds into a change/watchlist feed like this.
3. Cross-checks against rainfall - for every currently-discharging outfall, it looks up the nearest Environment Agency rain gauge and its rainfall total over the last 24 hours (Environment Agency real-time Rainfall API, also free and keyless) and sets dry_spell_flag: true when a discharge is happening with under 1mm of rain nearby in the last day - the first question anyone checking a discharge asks: was this the weather, or not?
4. Lets you narrow the watchlist - by water company, by watercourse name (e.g. "Thames", "Trent"), or by a radius around a point (a bathing spot, a fishing stretch, a stretch you swim or paddle).

Input

Field	Type	Default	Notes
lookbackHours	integer	48	How far back to look for status changes (6-168h).
company	string	-	Exact water company name to filter to.
watercourseContains	string	-	Case-insensitive substring match on the receiving watercourse.
nearLatitude / nearLongitude	number	-	Centre point for a radius filter.
nearRadiusKm	integer	25	Radius used only when both nearLatitude/nearLongitude are set.
includeRainfallContext	boolean	true	Attach nearest-gauge 24h rainfall to active discharges.
onlyChangedEvents	boolean	false	Drop rows with no change since the last run.

Output (one row per outfall event)

{
  "site_id": "AWS00608",
  "company": "Anglian Water",
  "status": "stopped",
  "status_code": 0,
  "event_type": "discharge_stopped",
  "watercourse": "Kirby Brook",
  "latitude": 51.838603,
  "longitude": 1.217465,
  "distance_km": null,
  "status_start_ms": 1790516771000,
  "latest_event_start_ms": 1790516476000,
  "latest_event_end_ms": 1790516755000,
  "last_updated_ms": 1790520400309,
  "rainfall_context": null
}

rainfall_context (only populated for currently-discharging outfalls):

{
  "available": true,
  "station_name": "Rainfall station",
  "station_ref": "E24874",
  "distance_note": "nearest Environment Agency tipping-bucket rain gauge within 15km",
  "rainfall_last_24h_mm": 0.0,
  "dry_spell_flag": true
}

Data sources (all official, public, keyless)

• Each water company's own public ArcGIS Feature Service EDM feed (the same layers behind streamwaterdata.co.uk's National Storm Overflow Hub).
• Environment Agency real-time flood-monitoring Rainfall API (environment.data.gov.uk/flood-monitoring), Open Government Licence, no registration.

Nothing is scraped from a rendered web page and no terms of service are bypassed: every request is a documented JSON query/readings call against a service the publisher itself intends for machine consumption.

Notes

• A company's feed being briefly unreachable does not fail the run; it is recorded per-company in the run's key-value store (RUN_STATS) and the other companies still report normally.
• The Actor resolves each company's current ArcGIS service URL from its stable item id on every run, so a company changing its underlying service URL (which has happened before) does not silently break this Actor.