Rockingham County, VA Fire Regulations: Propane Storage (2026)

Rockingham County's Zoning Ordinance addresses bulk propane storage as a supplemental land-use standard at Sec. ' The rule applies only in the A-1 and A-2 agricultural zoning districts, consistent with the county's approach of steering larger-scale fuel storage and distribution operations away from residential and business districts. Within those districts, the code sets a hard capacity ceiling: a tank used for storage and distribution of liquid petroleum gas may hold up to thirty thousand gallons. The code doesn't offer a path to exceed that ceiling through a special use permit or variance within this particular standard; a facility proposing a larger tank would need to be evaluated under a different use category or a legislative change to the ordinance.

The second half of the standard controls the operation's truck traffic rather than its footprint: large tractor-trailer delivery to the site is limited to four trucks per week. That cap keeps the periodic delivery of propane by tanker truck from turning into constant heavy-truck traffic on the rural roads that serve A-1 and A-2 land, and it applies regardless of how large the approved tank is, up to the 30,000-gallon ceiling. Because the standard sits in the same 'certain land uses' list as agriculture-related businesses and feed mills, it targets farm-and-rural-support fuel distributors rather than a homeowner's residential propane tank for heating or cooking, which falls under separate building and fire-code requirements rather than this zoning standard.