An open-data investigation into one river.
Storm overflows are only permitted to operate during rainfall and snowmelt. Every overflow in England now publishes its status in near real time, and rainfall gauges are public too. OUTFALL joins the two feeds for South West Water's region and surfaces the anomaly nobody else leads with: outfalls discharging when no rainfall has been recorded.
We started with one catchment — the Exe — because getting it right mattered more than getting it wide; the same tests now run across the whole region. The site is built to be screenshot-ready and citable: every discharge event has a stable page, and every figure traces back to a named public source under an open licence.
It is reported entirely from public data — Environment Agency EDM feeds, the EA Hydrology API, and South West Water's WaterFit Live storm-overflow data. No paywall, no press office.
Read the method and sources for the exact thresholds, the guards against false positives, and the known failure modes.