Fire stations — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each dot is a fire station. There are more than 140,000 worldwide. The size of a dot represents the footprint of the building, and there is only one colour. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records, such as which brigade runs it and its website. If there's a Wikipedia article, we show a short summary and a link to the full article, in your own language where possible.

Where the data comes from

Every station here is something a mapper added at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge or from a building they walked past. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves, and we haven't merged in any national register of fire stations.

What we include

We use one exact tag, `amenity=fire_station`. Because we match the tag exactly, a feature tagged as a fire station and a police station together is missed, though that way of tagging is uncommon.

Fire hydrants are not here. OpenStreetMap holds more than three million of them, and a hydrant is equipment rather than a station.

Colour

There is one colour, and that is a decision rather than something we forgot. The division worth drawing would be volunteer against professional, which is the most useful thing to know about a country's fire cover. OpenStreetMap has a tag for it, but under 5% of stations record it and its meaning varies between countries. A legend built on that would describe a twentieth of the map. Size represents the building instead, which does separate a city station with an appliance hall from a village one with a single bay, and the brigade's name is in the panel when you click.

Some of these are ambulance stations too

More than 500 stations here are also tagged as an ambulance station. That is a real institution rather than a tagging error, because a combined station housing both services is normal in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. We count them here, and they appear on the ambulance stations map as well. Click one and the panel shows what the feature actually claims, so nothing is hidden by our choice of which map to put it on.

Size

The size of a dot represents the footprint of the station in square metres. About 60% of stations are drawn as an outline, which is a high share, because a fire station needs an appliance hall with doors onto the road and so is nearly always a building of its own rather than a unit inside somebody else's. Among those, the typical station covers about 510 m². The rest are recorded as a single point and drawn at one nominal size.

The largest features here are training grounds and regional depots rather than town stations, and the biggest covers well over a square kilometre. We cap the size scale far below that so ordinary stations stay distinguishable from one another.

Where the map is empty

An empty area means nobody has mapped a station there, not that a place has no fire cover. Mapping is more complete in North America, Australia and western Europe than in west Africa or central Asia, so the thinner parts of this map are thinner than the ground is. Countries also organise fire cover differently, and a country built on volunteer village brigades genuinely has more separate stations than one covering the same area from a few professional bases.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. A station shown here may have closed, and a closed station often keeps its building for years.

Source and licence

Back to the map