Helebridge sewage treatment works, run by South West Water, has 2 monitored storm overflows discharging to Bude Bay (Atlantic Ocean). In 2025 they recorded 119 spills totalling 1,036 hours, against 153 spills and 1,412 hours in 2024. By hours spilling, it ranks 105 of 334 South West 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
4 Dec 2025, 00:00
Helebridge WwTW
6.5 days
16 Dec 2025, 14:45
Helebridge WwTW
4.0 days
4 Jan 2025, 20:34
Helebridge WwTW
2.3 days
1 Dec 2025, 07:15
Helebridge WwTW
2.1 days
13 Dec 2025, 05:15
Helebridge WwTW
2.1 days
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 estimate17,748 m³range 7,069 – 44,557 m³
In litres17.7 millionrange 7.1 million – 44.6 million L
Olympic swimming pools7.1at 2,500 m³ each
Organic load, as people's raw sewage26,622person-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.
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
8.5 kg
46 kg
241 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
706.9 billion organisms
17.7 trillion organisms
445.6 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.
Helebridge WwTW
Storm tank at sewage works · discharges to Bude Bay (Atlantic Ocean)
Spills 2025
39 (633 hours) · down 34% on 2024
Spills 2024
59 (961 hours)
Long-term average
27.3 spills a year (monitored since 2019)
Monitor uptime
52% of the year · Telemetry or data archiving failure / issue
SBB00559 · 301299 · company name: HELEBRIDGE STW_SO_BUDE
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.