About River Level Alerts UK

River Level Alerts UK was founded by Michael Sibley; a flood-prone developer (and artist) living in Dorset.

Our bath tub filled itself during the last big flood!

Having lived on a houseboat on the river Severn in Tewkesbury and now sandwiched between a chalk stream and a mill stream in West Dorset, I have become fairly familiar with flooding.

After a dramatic flood event in 2011, I set to work building flood defences around our house, but one problem I kept encountering was the timing of the Environment Agency flood warnings. The threshold at which they would send me an SMS message to warn of possible flooding was nearly a metre below the point at which our property would actually flood, meaning I would often have to wake myself throughout the night to check the levels on the Environment Agency website.

When the Environment Agency made their river level real-time data API available to the public I saw an opportunity to address this problem and set about making a basic system to send me an email and SMS when our local stream reached various thresholds that were relevant to our property. Over the years, this evolved into a system that I was able to offer to our friends in the village and eventually to anyone that wanted to use it.

I hope you find it useful!