Everything we change, and everything we get wrong
We keep a record of every touch of this site, so you can see it is looked after — the mistakes on the record alongside the things that work, and who found each fault and when. A log with only good news in it would not be worth reading. One with only bad news would not be true.
This page is written into the site itself, so it keeps working even when the rest of the site cannot reach its data.
- Fix
We went looking, and found our advance warning could not have worked
This site exists to give Bampton more notice than the gauge in the village can, by watching rivers upstream. On a dry morning in July we set out to prove those upstream gauges were live. Four of the five were not, and never had been — leaving only the Bampton gauge itself, which tells us water has already arrived, not that it is coming. The six to eighteen hours of warning was not less accurate than we thought; it could not have happened at all. No flood exposed this and nobody reported it: we found it by checking on a quiet day. All five are now live.
- Data
Checking every gauge one by one found nine that had never reported
Having found four dead gauges, we did not assume the rest were fine. We tested all eighteen against the Environment Agency’s own records, one at a time. Nine of them were being asked for under the wrong reference number — each gauge has two, and they are not interchangeable — so they returned nothing at all instead of failing loudly. Nothing looks exactly like calm. Everything affected was on the Windrush, the Evenlode and the Leach. All eighteen now report, and an automatic check tells us the day any of them stops.
- Improvement
Eighteen gauges now feed this site, across four rivers
The site reads eighteen gauges: the one in the village on the Shill Brook, one on the Clanfield Brook, and sixteen more along the Thames, the Windrush, the Evenlode and the Leach. Five of those sixteen sit on the Thames above Bampton — water on its way here, rather than water already here. Six sit below the village, where a high Thames can hold our brook back. The remaining five are on tributaries that do not drain through Bampton at all; they show how wet the wider area is under the same weather.
- Fix
Repairing the gauges exposed a fault that would have raised a false alarm
Within minutes of the gauges reporting again, the site announced the Thames rising a metre and a half in a single hour, on a dry day with no rain. It was taking two different measurements from the same gauge and comparing one against the other. In November that would have told the village something was coming that was not. Because we were watching the repair, we saw it the same morning, fixed it the same afternoon, and added a check that refuses any rise too fast to be real.
- Fix
The site could have said "moderate" while the brook was at a record level
We asked our own risk score what it would report if the brook stood at Storm Bert levels. It answered "moderate". The score averaged the river level together with rainfall, ground and upstream conditions, so a dangerously high brook could be pulled back down by everything else being calm. The measured level now sets a floor the score cannot fall below. No resident ever saw this: the brook has not come close to those levels since the site launched, and we found it by asking the question rather than by living through the answer.
- Improvement
You will see the word "elevated" more often this winter
As part of the same change, a brook between 1.06m and 1.40m is now described as "elevated" rather than "moderate". Nothing about the river has changed and nothing has got worse — we have made the wording match what those levels have always meant. Expect to see it during ordinary wet spells.
- Fix
We read our own front page as a resident would, and it contradicted itself
During the data outage the page correctly warned that the live river feed was unavailable, and directly underneath showed a green status light and the words "Trend: stable". Green reads as "safe". Nobody reported this. We found it by sitting down and reading our own front page the way someone in the village would, in the middle of the outage it happened in. It now shows grey, says the level is unknown, and points you to the Environment Agency.
- Fix
We took the river reading away on purpose, and the site still said "low risk"
With no river reading at all, the site would still work out a risk level from everything else and call it low. Unknown is not the same as safe. We found this deliberately — by removing the reading and watching what the page did — rather than waiting to discover it during a flood. It now says plainly when it does not know.
- Improvement
The live river level kept working while the database did not
The database has been unavailable since 24 July. Since the 27th the level on the front page has come straight from the Environment Agency instead, and it has not stopped since. This is no longer a plan for an outage; it is something that has now held up during one. Stored history and predictions remain unavailable until the database returns — the number that matters most during a flood does not depend on it.
- Outage
Our database ran out of its monthly allowance
The site could not show stored history or predictions. Live river levels were restored on 27 July by reading the Environment Agency directly. We are moving to a different arrangement so this does not recur.
- Data
Auditing our own accuracy figures found one impossible reading skewing them
We went back over the accuracy figures we publish, to check they were honest. A single physically impossible reading from the river gauge had been enough to distort them. We now reject impossible readings before they are stored, and we corrected the figures that had already been published rather than let them stand.
- Security
Routine security maintenance
We review and update the software this site is built on regularly. This site has no accounts and no forms — there is nothing of yours held here to expose. If that ever changes, or if anything happens that affects you, it will be recorded on this page.
- Improvement
The site now tells you when a reading is old
Previously a reading that had stopped updating looked exactly like a fresh one. A banner now appears when the latest reading is more than about an hour and a half old.
- Improvement
Two separate systems fetch the river reading, so one failing does not stop it
The gauge is read every fifteen minutes. Two independent systems ask for it, running on different machines in different places, and either one on its own is enough — each run reaches back over the previous day and fills in anything missed. If one stops, the reading is still collected, and the record does not develop a hole nobody notices.
- Outage
The site showed the same readings for ten days without updating
Between 22 May and 1 June several parts of the site quietly served old numbers instead of fetching new ones, and gave no sign anything was wrong. Anyone who looked during those ten days was reading stale figures without being told so. This one was live, not hypothetical, and we claim no credit for catching it early. We found the cause, fixed it, and added an automatic check that fails the build if it can happen again.
- Fix
We switched off our own sewage report rather than leave it wrong
We checked what it was producing and found figures for the wrong stretch of river. We took it down the same day rather than leave a working-looking download handing people the wrong catchment, and it stayed down until it could be rebuilt properly.
- Improvement
Sewage discharges are recorded, including the ones in dry weather
The site records every storm overflow the water company reports within about fifteen kilometres of Bampton: when each discharge started, when it stopped, and how much rain fell at that spot at the time. A discharge with no rain behind it is flagged, because a storm overflow releasing in dry weather may fall outside the terms it is allowed to operate under. Any date range can be downloaded as a spreadsheet or a report.
- Improvement
Every prediction we make is published with the error it turned out to have
Each forecast is recorded before the event, then compared with what the brook actually did, and both numbers stay on the site with the difference between them in metres — the misses alongside the hits. We have not found another flood service that publishes its own errors this way, the official ones included. One limit we will not bury: the model has only ever been tested against levels the brook has actually reached since January 2026, which is a long way below Storm Bert. Where it matters most, it is untested.
- Fix
The sewage page could show normal-looking data that was not real
When the real discharge data was unavailable, the page filled in with stand-in figures that looked like ordinary readings. We removed that, so it now says plainly when it does not know.
The Bampton Flood Group
We're a handful of Bampton residents who got tired of refreshing the Environment Agency page during Storm Bert, overnight on 24–25 November 2024. We are not the Environment Agency and this site is not an official warning service — it is an early-warning tool that watches the upstream catchment so the village has more notice than the gauge at Bampton alone can give.
Live levels come from the Environment Agency's gauge on the Shill Brook at Bampton, read every 15 minutes, alongside seventeen other gauges upstream and along the Thames. Rainfall comes from public weather services. Our risk model adds upstream catchment rainfall across Shilton, Brize Norton, Carterton, Alvescot and Black Bourton. All the raw numbers and the model are public.
Read the methodology →For legally binding flood warnings, always check the Environment Agency's check-for-flooding service. We point you to their warnings whenever they are active.
EA flood warnings →