The safety of petrol stations is critical because it stores flammable and explosive gasoline and diesel. Therefore, appropriate fire apparatuses should be deployed to petrol stations in case of a fire emergency. In this work, we proposed a regional evaluation model to predict the fire apparatus requirements of petrol stations based on travel times extracted from online maps. The travel time of the minimum fire apparatus requirements (1 water truck and 1 foam truck) are determined to be within 4 min. To validate the model, 37 fire stations and 458 petrol stations in Changsha, China were considered as case studies leading to 144 evaluation scenarios. The results showed the fire apparatus requirement scores of 144 scenarios were ranged from 47.69 to 56.69 (less than 60) out of 100, which were in bad levels. Furthermore, results from visualization showed that the worst part of scores were petrol stations in rural areas. Therefore, these petrol stations in rural areas should be equipped with more fire extinguishers and foam extinguishing systems. (C) 2020 Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.