The easy thing for the people who live on the banks of the River Dart in Devon might have been to grumble and groan about the sewage spills that blight their beloved waterway. Instead, citizen environmentalists in the area have created a unique online platform that flags up spills in real time, highlights spots that are repeatedly polluted, and sets out where improvement work is planned – and where it isn’t. Friends of the Dart (FOD), an independent, not-for-profit organisation, says its River Hub is the first platform to pull together, overflow by overflow, such a sweep of granular detail about how one British river is being polluted.
It argues it should be up to water companies or the Environment Agency to provide this sort of information in a user-friendly way – but claims they don’t – so it has done the digging and provided what it believes is a vital service. Rob Worthington, one of the designers of the platform, said there was a lot of justified anger about sewage. It also coincides with the prime minister, Andy Burnham, telling the Labour conference that water was a symbol of what had gone wrong with Britain and promising to reverse Margaret Thatcher’s “ideological ban” on the public ownership of water companies.
Worthington told the Guardian about River Hub while sitting on a bench at Steamer Quay on the Dart in the market town of Totnes. This is a designated bathing water spot – but Worthington says he would not swim there, knowing about what goes on a little farther upstream. The hub has a page that people can check to find out where spills are happening right now and where they stopped in the last 12 hours.
There is also information about “dry spills” – discharges when there was no or little rain. Worthington acknowledged other independent sewage maps, such as Top of the Poops, also do this job. A section called Why it keeps happening? probes issues such as whether sewage treatment works have the capacity to deal with the sewage produced by the size of the population it serves.
The hub concludes that not all do. In Who is fixing it?, the hub spells out works that are taking place or planned, with the dates they are due to be completed, and also draws attention to problem spots where there is no planned remedial work. A lengthy How we know? section sets out the hub’s methodology – for example, where the rainfall data it uses to classify each dry spill comes from.
Much of the data used, such as SWW spill information and permits, is in the public domain but some of it can be difficult to spot, and FOD had to extract some through freedom of information requests. Worthington has worked on the hub alongside his day job as a business analyst and accepted that the picture the platform provided was incomplete and there could be inaccuracies. He and the rest of the team are happy to be corrected when they have got something wrong.
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