Rescue services — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each dot is a rescue station: a lifeguard post, a mountain rescue base or a water rescue station. There are more than 7,000 worldwide, which makes this the smallest layer on the site. Colour represents which of the three services it is, and the size of a dot represents the footprint of the station. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records, such as the body that runs it. 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 aerial imagery. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves, and we haven't merged in any national register of lifeboat or mountain rescue stations.

What we include

We use three exact tags and nothing else: `emergency=lifeguard`, `emergency=mountain_rescue` and `emergency=water_rescue_station`. The `emergency` key holds more than three million objects in OpenStreetMap, and most of them are fire hydrants, so we never take the key as a whole.

Some things you might expect are elsewhere. Lifeboat stations usually carry a tag of their own and are not here. A surf club that also provides lifeguards appears only where somebody added the emergency tag alongside the club tag.

Colour

Colour represents which of the three services a station is, because the three are not the same geography at all. Lifeguard posts number more than 5,900 and follow a coastline, and sometimes a lake or a lido. Mountain rescue bases number more than 1,000 and follow a mountain range. Water rescue stations number more than 130 and sit on a river, a canal or a large inland lake. Drawn in one colour the layer would read as a single service scattered oddly. Drawn in three it reads as three separate patterns that happen to share a map.

The densest place here is a city beach

It is Santa Monica, not the Alps, and that is worth understanding before you read anything else into a crowded stretch of coast. Los Angeles County runs a large municipal lifeguard service, and somebody has mapped each of its towers along a few miles of beach as a separate object. Elsewhere a beach with the same cover or better is mapped as one station, or as nothing at all. A dense stretch of coast means somebody mapped the towers one by one.

Size

The size of a dot represents the footprint of the station in square metres. These are the smallest buildings on the site apart from the windmills. About 40% are drawn as an outline, and among those the typical station covers about 50 m², which is a hut. The rest are a bare point with no shape and are drawn at one nominal size. On this layer the colour tells you most of what there is to know and the size very little, because a lifeguard tower and a mountain rescue base are not far apart in floor area whatever else separates them.

Where the map is empty

A blank stretch means one of three things: no service, a service recorded as a single point, or a service nobody has mapped. These stations also need a coast, a mountain range or a river before they can exist at all, so much of the world is empty here for a reason that has nothing to do with mapping.

A few features tagged as mountain rescue in eastern Ethiopia cover square kilometres of hillside and are almost certainly a tagging error. There are too few to filter on, so we name them here rather than quietly removing them.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. A seasonal lifeguard post is mapped whether or not anyone is on duty today.

Source and licence

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