Toppesfield sewage works: storm overflow spills 2025

Toppesfield sewage treatment works, run by Anglian Water, has 1 monitored storm overflow discharging to Toppesfield Brook River Colne. In 2025 it recorded 40 spills totalling 145 hours, against 78 spills and 710 hours in 2024. By hours spilling, it ranks 136 of 419 Anglian Water works, where 1 spilled longest.

Every spill in 2025

Each blue mark is one spill, placed by when it started and sized by how long it lasted. Hover over a mark for the date and duration.

Hours spilling by month, 2025

Hours, measured by the event duration monitor.

Longest single spills

Started (GMT)	Overflow	Duration
24 Feb 2025, 00:00	Toppesfield STW	1.0 days
25 Feb 2025, 00:00	Toppesfield STW	10.8 h
27 Jun 2025, 02:02	Toppesfield STW	7.8 h
27 Jun 2025, 17:14	Toppesfield STW	6.8 h
31 Jan 2025, 03:16	Toppesfield STW	4.3 h

Estimated 2025 spill volume and pollution

Estimate, not a measurement. Monitors record how long an overflow spills, not how much. This calculator back-calculates a spill rate from the size of the works, using the Environment Agency's permit formulae, and multiplies it by published storm-sewage concentrations. How it works.

This works serves fewer than 2,000 people, or was not matched to a UWWTD report, so its size is not published. The population equivalent above is a placeholder of 1,000. Enter the population served if you know it.

Volume, central estimate2,478 m³range 987 – 6,220 m³

In litres2.5 millionrange 986,895 – 6.2 million L

Olympic swimming pools1.0at 2,500 m³ each

Organic load, as people's raw sewage3,716person-days of untreated BOD

Assumed spill rate while spilling: 1.9 – 11.9 L/s (central 4.8 L/s), from a dry-weather flow of 1.9 L/s.

Pollutant released	Low	Central	High	Concentration used (low / typical / high)
BOD₅ (organic load)	39 kg	223 kg	1,244 kg	40 / 90 / 200 mg/L Low/high: Europe range, Ellis & Jenkins 2005; typical: UK, Ellis & Jenkins 2005 (both via botturi)
Suspended solids	104 kg	1,053 kg	4,485 kg	105 / 425 / 721 mg/L Low/high: Europe range; typical: UK, Ellis & Jenkins 2005 (via botturi)
Ammonium-N	1.9 kg	16 kg	58 kg	1.9 / 6.3 / 9.3 mg/L Low: Germany, Brombach 2005; typical/high: Paris range 3.3–9.3 midpoint and top, Gasperi 2012 (via botturi); no UK value found
Total phosphorus	1.2 kg	6.4 kg	34 kg	1.2 / 2.6 / 5.4 mg/L Low/high: Paris, Gasperi 2012; typical: Slovakia (via botturi). UK figure of 10 mg/L treated as an outlier
E. coli	98.7 billion organisms	2.5 trillion organisms	62.2 trillion organisms	10,000 / 100,000 / 1.0 million per 100 mL Median range at CSO and retention-tank outlets, Stott et al. 2018 (via botturi); typical = log midpoint

Low combines the low spill rate with low concentrations, and high combines high with high, so the true figure is very likely inside the range. Long spills become more diluted as they go on, so the central figure tends to overstate the load of long events. The calculator does not estimate the effect on the receiving water, which depends on river flow or tide at the time of the spill.

Toppesfield STW

Storm tank at sewage works · discharges to Toppesfield Brook River Colne

Spills 2025: 40 (145 hours) · down 49% on 2024
Spills 2024: 78 (710 hours)
Long-term average: 45.8 spills a year (monitored since 2021)
Monitor uptime: 86% of the year · Comms failure / issue
High-spill reason (company): Performance - GW inundation
Investigation: Env Act (SODRP) investigation ongoing, Operational investigation completed, Bathing Water and/or Shellfish Water investigation ongoing
Improvement: UWWTR improvement ongoing, Operational improvement ongoing
WFD catchment: Toppesfield Brook (GB105037041250)
Outlet location: TL7406036540 (OS grid reference) · View on Apple Maps
EA ID / permit: AWS01395 · ASENF1318

How the estimate works

Dry-weather flow (DWF) = population × water use per person × (1 + infiltration). Water use is 136.5 L per person per day, England's per-capita consumption for 2024–25 [EA]. Infiltration of groundwater into sewers is taken as 0–40% of that flow [Escritt, via HBF]. The Environment Agency defines DWF as PG + I + E [EA].
Population. The size of each works comes from the load entering it as reported under the Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive, in population equivalents (1 p.e. = 60 g of BOD a day) [UWWTD]. We treat population equivalent as population. That overstates flow where trade effluent adds load, and no official source links the two. Works serving fewer than 2,000 p.e. are not reported, so their size has to be entered by hand.
Low spill rate = DWF. This is the method used by Giakoumis & Voulvoulis (2026), which they note likely underestimates storm loads [G&V].
High spill rate = Formula A − flow to full treatment = (DWF + 1360P) − 3DWF. This is the largest flow the permit expects the storm tanks to handle before it passes on to treatment or overflows [EA]. The central rate is the geometric mean of the low and high rates.
Volume = spill rate × hours spilling, with hours taken from the event duration monitor.
Pollution = volume × published storm-sewage concentrations [Botturi et al.] [US EPA]. Organic load is also shown as person-days of untreated sewage at 60 g of BOD per person per day [UWWTD].

What this cannot tell you. It gives no real flow for any single spill, and no effect on the river or sea, which depends on the flow, tide and the other pressures on the water at the time. It gives no figure for spills from overflows on the sewer network, which serve catchments of unknown size. It is a way to put hours into rough physical terms, not a substitute for flow monitoring.

Sources

← All Anglian Water works · Contains Environment Agency data licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Spill start and stop times: © Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2026. All rights reserved. They are water-company data and have not been verified by the Environment Agency. Works size: EEA Waterbase UWWTD. How to read the data.