Every year on August 14, the Day of the Western Bug is celebrated, which unites all defenders of the river.
The celebration of the Western Bug Day was first started in 2019 at the meeting of the Basin Council of the Western Bug and Xyan Rivers.
Bug (Буг, Богъ) is a name of Indo-European origin that first appears on the pages of ancient chronicles alongside the ethnonym “buzhany”. The name comes from the Indo-European root *bheug(h) — “to bend, bend”, etymologically related to the Proto-Slavic infinitive *bъgati — “to bend, twist” and to the Proto-Slavic root *bag- // *bog- // *bug – with the reconstructed meaning “flooded place; current, flow”, related to the Proto-Slavic noun *bag-no – “swamp, swamp”. The name indicates the features of the hydroscape of the river with a large number of bends and wetlands.
The length is 772 km (in Ukraine 392 km), the area of the basin is 39,420 km² (in Ukraine – 10,100 km²). The slope of the river is 0.3 m/km. The Western Bug is a plain river (swampy floodplain, old trees, winding stream); there are many lakes in the river basin, including Shatsky Lakes. Navigable in the lower current.
There are 7 reservoirs with a total volume of 31.4 million m³ in the river basin on the territory of Lviv region. The largest of them: Dobrotvirske — 14.8 million m³ and Sokalske — 4.92 million m³.
The average annual water flow varies along the length of the river from 1.12 (the village of Sasiv) to 29.5 m³/s (the city of Sokal).
In the conditional structure on the border of Ukraine, Poland and Belarus, the average water flow of the Zahidny Bug River is 52.3 m³/s (obtained by the calculation method of Ukrainian hydrologists).
The average mineralization of river water is: spring flood — 497 mg/dm³; summer-autumn limit — 518 mg/dm³; winter limit — 573 mg/dm³.
The average annual ion flow with the waters of the Western Bug from the territory of Ukraine is 793.5 thousand t/year (58% – spring flood, 26% – summer-autumn flood, 16% – winter flood).