Methodology and editorial policy

Every alert on Watereport points back to at least one public source: a health authority notice, a water utility announcement, or a local news report about such a notice. Source links are shown on each alert page and open the original document. Watereport never replaces or paraphrases a binding official instruction; the linked source always takes precedence.

Sources are collected through scheduled searches over public news and authority pages. Duplicate reports about the same event are merged into one alert with several source links.

Candidate pages are found automatically with keyword and news searches per country and language. A language model extracts structured fields from the source text: location, region, country, event type, start and end dates, and a short summary. Geocoding adds approximate coordinates for the map. This extraction is automated and can be wrong or incomplete.

Alerts derived from automation are labelled as such where applicable, and the underlying source is always linked so readers can verify the original wording.

Published alerts are monitored by the Watereport editorial team. Obvious misclassifications, wrong locations, non-drinking-water topics and duplicates are removed or corrected manually. Individual alerts can be unpublished at any time. We do not claim that every single alert is individually fact checked by a person before it goes live; publication is automated, review is continuous and reactive.

Alerts carry a first-seen timestamp and a last-updated timestamp. When new source material appears for the same event, the alert is updated rather than duplicated.

If no new official information appears for 21 days, an alert is automatically marked as resolved. This is an automatic status change, not an official all clear; the alert page states this explicitly. For binding status information, always consult your local water utility.

If you find an error, write to info@watereport.com with the page URL and a short description. We review correction requests as quickly as possible; we do not promise a fixed response time.

Substantive corrections (wrong location, wrong event type, wrong status) are applied to the affected alert or report and the last-updated timestamp changes accordingly. Alerts that should never have been published are unpublished and disappear from listings, feeds and the sitemap.

Coverage depends entirely on what is published publicly. Advisories that are only communicated by loudspeaker, letter or phone will not appear here. Absence of an alert is never evidence that water is safe.

Machine translation is offered for convenience; the source-language text remains authoritative. Report articles may be partly generated from incident data, and a manual review before publication is not guaranteed; the original sources and this methodology page are authoritative. They are informational, not legal or medical advice.

Publisher and responsible contact details are listed in the imprint. Data handling is described in the privacy policy. Aggregate coverage figures are published on the data page.