The most dangerous thing on a service station site is familiarity. Walk past the same compressor room, the same LPG cage and the same fire extinguisher every day and you stop seeing them. Hazards don’t appear overnight; they accumulate quietly while everyone’s busy, which is why the sites that stay out of trouble aren’t the ones with the most careful owners, they’re the ones with a routine. Five minutes, once a week, same circuit every time. Here’s the walk.
Start at the driveway
Look at the forecourt the way a customer’s lawyer would. Trip edges, potholes, hoses that don’t retract, spill kits that are actually stocked rather than raided months ago. Check the emergency stop is visible and nothing is stacked in front of it. If you have an LPG exchange cage, check the clearances: cylinders belong away from doorways, drains and pits, because vapour finds low points, and the clearance rules exist for exactly that reason.
The rooms nobody looks in
The compressor room and the storeroom are where housekeeping goes to die. The checks are simple: clear access to the compressor with nothing leaning against it, shelving you can reach without climbing, heavy stock stored low, and nothing stacked against hot water systems or switchboards. Cleaning chemicals belong in closed, labelled containers, not in whatever came to hand when the last bottle split. None of this takes equipment or budget, only someone actually opening the door.
The counter checks
Behind the counter: does the first aid kit exist, is it stocked, and does everyone on shift know where it is? A kit is required by law, but a kit that was emptied in March fails the only test that matters. Check the entry and exit doors open and close properly, locks and bolts work, and nothing blocks the path out. On a site with one person on at night, the door hardware and the clear exit are the safety system.
The tanks
Confirm dips are being done daily and recorded, every tank, every day, at the delivery docket quantity when deliveries land. Fuel reconciliation is an environmental obligation, but it’s also the earliest warning you’ll ever get of a leak, and a record book with gaps in it protects nobody. If the numbers are drifting and nobody can say why, that’s not an admin problem to catch up on later, it’s the whole point of keeping the numbers.
Write it down every time
A walk-through that isn’t recorded didn’t happen, as far as a regulator, an insurer or a court is concerned. Date, initials, what was checked, what was found, what was fixed. The record does two jobs: it keeps the routine honest, and on the worst day, it’s the difference between “we have a documented safety system” and an expensive silence. An exercise book by the till does the job. A structured checklist does it better.
For ServoPro members, the structured version already exists: the ServoPro Site Audit App. It’s designed specifically for petrol stations and covers the whole site across sixteen guided audits, from the forecourt, compressor room and storeroom through to refrigeration, food operations, switchboard, security and LPG. At the start of each month we email you when your site audits are ready, you complete them on any device (a phone or tablet works best, so you can attach photos as you go), and every completed audit is stored in the cloud, dated and ready whenever you need to produce it. Our team then analyses your audits for compliance and comes back with advice on anything that gets flagged. If you’re a member and not using the app yet, ask us and we’ll set your site up.
The walk itself is the habit that matters. Five minutes, once a week, written down. Familiar eyes miss things; a routine doesn’t.