Water events and incidents
The structured ledger of major droughts, floods, contamination incidents, outbreaks, spills and failures — with cause, impact, response and aftermath for each.
The outbreak in Soho, London, that John Snow traced to a single contaminated water pump — establishing that cholera is waterborne and founding modern epidemiology.
A change of water source without corrosion control caused lead to leach from service lines across Flint, Michigan, exposing a city of around 100,000 people, and was compounded by official …
Three consecutive failed rainy seasons brought Cape Town to within months of shutting off municipal supply to most of the city — the point the authorities named "Day Zero".
The benchmark British drought of the instrumental record: sixteen months of exceptional dryness ending in the hottest summer then measured, which emptied reservoirs, cracked the ground ope…
Methylmercury discharged into Minamata Bay by a chemical plant accumulated in fish and shellfish, causing severe neurological disease across the fishing community that ate them.
The largest documented waterborne disease outbreak in United States history, caused by Cryptosporidium passing through a functioning but inadequately performing filtration plant.
The summer in which the untreated sewage of London, discharged directly to the Thames, became unbearable at Westminster — and Parliament funded a sewer system within eighteen days.
The reservoir system supplying most of metropolitan São Paulo fell to a few percent of usable capacity, bringing a megacity of 20 million within weeks of supply failure.
A colliery spoil tip saturated by groundwater and rainfall liquefied and flowed downhill into a school in Aberfan, killing 116 children and 28 adults.
The driest summer in England since 1976, in which the National Drought Group declared drought across most of the country, several rivers ran dry at their heads, and a hosepipe ban covered …
The most severe European drought in at least five hundred years by several assessments, with record low flows on the Rhine, Po, Loire and Danube.
Contamination of a municipal well in Walkerton, Ontario, with E. coli O157:H7 and Campylobacter from cattle manure, compounded by falsified monitoring records.
The collapse of a mining tailings dam released a wave of mine waste that killed 270 people and contaminated the Paraopeba River.
Twenty tonnes of aluminium sulphate were discharged into the wrong tank at Lowermoor treatment works, entering the supply serving Camelford in Cornwall at extreme concentration.
Extensive blue-green algal blooms across the largest lake in the British Isles, which supplies around 40% of Northern Ireland’s drinking water.
A drought that brought Yorkshire close to running out of water, with tankering between reservoirs and standpipes prepared, despite the region not being short of rainfall in absolute terms.
A tailings dam failure at a gold recovery operation released cyanide-contaminated water into the Someș, Tisza and Danube, killing aquatic life over hundreds of kilometres.
Flooding overwhelmed an already failing treatment plant, leaving a city of roughly 150,000 people without reliable running water for weeks.
A Cryptosporidium outbreak in the Brixham area of south Devon caused by contamination entering the local supply network.
Levee failure flooded most of New Orleans, destroying water and sanitation services and creating widespread contamination of standing floodwater.