How to read the southern water beachbuoy website

On this page we’ll explain what Southern Water’s Beachbuoy website is and how you should use it.

What is Beachbuoy?

Southern Water describe Beachbuoy as: “our interactive, near real-time web app designed to help you stay informed about any storm overflow releases at nearby bathing waters.”

Whilst we might raise an eyebrow at the idea of their information being ‘near real-time’, Beachbuoy can prove useful for determining when and where sewage releases have taken place, especially if you swim outside of the bathing season, when most of the releases tend to occur.

So, how do you use it?

When you visit the Beachbuoy website (https://www.southernwater.co.uk/our-region/clean-rivers-and-seas-task-force/beachbuoy/) you’ll find an interactive map with markers for each bathing location, as shown below.

If the marker is blue, it means that there have been no releases at that location within the last 72 hours that Southern Water classify as ‘impacting’ on water quality. This last bit is important as it doesn’t always mean that there have been no sewage released at all. We explain this in greater detail below.

A yellow marker indicates that a release took place between 24 - 72 hours ago. In this instance it may or may not be safe to swim and is a judgement call on your part.

A red marker means that there has been a release to that bathing location within the last 24 hours. We would always avoid swimming until at least one or two more tidal cycles have passed following a recent release such as this.

You can click on your bathing location to show details of recent releases. If it has been raining we would always recommend clicking on your bathing location.

The reason for this is that Southern Water do not classify every sewage release is impacting. Depending on length or tidal conditions, some releases are classed as ‘non-impacting’ on bathing conditions. These releases will not appear on the map.

In our view this is an extremely cynical excuse to mask the visibility of certain release and, therefore, we would always take the additional step of clicking on your bathing location to double check.

Underneath the interactive map, you can click the following button to show the latest releases from Southern Water…

This will lead you to a chronological table of all Southern Water’s releases including all coastal bathing locations in their region. It can be filtered to just your specific location and displays as below:

The status column indicated whether a given release is ‘genuine’, 'under review’ or ‘not genuine’. The latter usually indicates a false release due to a faulty sensor and can be discounted.

However if a release is ‘under review’ we would assume the worst and refrain from swimming until it is updated otherwise.

The ‘start’, ‘end’ and ‘duration’ columns are self-explanatory. It should be noted that the ‘end’ column will continue to update on the hour every hour during an ongoing release, with an hour lag.

So at 14:00 an ongoing release will display an end date of 13:00. Then an hour later if it is still ongoing it will change to 14:00.

Usually when a release has actually finished, you can tell because the specific minute in which the release ended will display (eg. 14:24).

Finally we have the location columns. The ‘bathing site’ column on the right indicates the general location affected by the release (eg. Herne Bay, Tankerton) whereas the ‘outfall’ column shows the specific sewage pipe that the release is coming from.

Most bathing locations are impacted by multiple outfalls and, confusingly, some outfalls can affect more than one bathing location, depending on proximity and tidal flow.

To check the outfalls in your bathing location, return to the interactive map, click on the bathing location and they will appear on the map as green circles, as below, unless there has been a release, in which instance they will be red.