The backlog
Open faults on the map each day, split by network. Flat or rising means faults are arriving as fast as they are cleared.
Arriving vs clearing
New faults appearing each day against faults dropping off the map. The day tracking began is excluded, since everything appears at once on that day.
How long have they been open?
Age of currently open faults, measured from the date Thames Water raised the work order.
Where in the process
Type of problem
External sewer flooding
Sewage flooding outside a property. Thames Water has asked Ofwat to confirm that these payments should not be automatic.
Longest-running open faults
The oldest work orders Thames Water is still showing as unresolved.
Problems the public has reported
Open faults by local authority
What this is
Thames Water publishes a map of current problems — leaks, blockages, flooding, pollution — but it only ever shows now. A fault that has been open for two years looks exactly like one raised this morning, and once a pin disappears there is no record it was ever there.
This site takes a snapshot of that map every day and keeps the history. That makes it possible to ask the questions the map cannot answer: is the backlog growing? How long does a leak actually take to fix? Which towns wait longest?
Where the data comes from
The map is an ArcGIS application. Its public feature layers —
CleanWaterOpenWorkOrder, WasteWaterOpenWorkOrder and the
pending-pins layer behind the "Leak" markers — are read directly, unchanged. Nothing
here is estimated or modelled: every number is a count of Thames Water's own published
records.
Work orders and public reports are counted separately. A report is what appears the moment someone reports a problem; a work order is what exists once Thames Water schedules work. Thames Water keeps only about a week of reports, so one that never becomes a work order vanishes from their map with no trace. Those are kept here.
How to read it
- Age is measured from
WorkOrderRaisedDate, Thames Water's own timestamp for when the work order was created. - Cleared means a fault stopped appearing in the feed. That usually means it was fixed, but the feed does not say so explicitly — a work order can also be merged, cancelled or reclassified.
- Time to fix counts from the raised date to the day the fault left the map. Faults already open on the day tracking began are included, so this figure is if anything generous.
- Faults sometimes reappear after dropping out for a day. Those are counted once and flagged, not double-counted.
- A report leaving the map does not prove it became a work order. The two feeds share no reference number, so the link can only be inferred from place and timing.
Check the numbers yourself
Every daily snapshot is committed to the repository as a compressed change log, and the SQLite database is rebuilt from those files on every run — so any figure on this page can be reproduced from the raw record.
Source and data on GitHub Download the SQLite database
Not affiliated with or endorsed by Thames Water Utilities Ltd. Source released under the AGPL-3.0-or-later. Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors.