Overview

By far the largest quantities of chemicals are found in storage facilities, which may be at chemical plants or in other storage terminals. The prevention of loss in storage is therefore extremely important.

It has long been appreciated that loss of containment from storage of toxic chemicals could have particularly serious consequences. The hazard of toxic release has been considered, therefore, in some detail in Chapter 18. The hazard was realized at Bhopal, which was the worst disaster which has ever occurred in the chemical industry. A toxic release with consequences on this scale, or anything approaching it, is extremely rare and stringent measures are taken to avoid it.

Losses through fires in storage, on the other hand, constitute a major part of the losses sustained by the industry. Mostly these result in financial loss rather than loss of life and tend to make relatively little public impact. But there are exceptions such as the disasters at Feyzin, Caracas and Mexico City.

Some idea of the potential for fire loss may be obtained by considering the value represented by a single storage tank. A jumbo tank might contain 500,000 barrels of oil worth US$10 per barrel and might itself be worth US$4 per barrel capacity, making a total value of US$7 million (OIA, 1975 Loss Control Bull. 400 1). Jumbo tanks of from 300,000 to 1,000,000 barrels capacity are currently being used to store not only crude oil but also flammable intermediate and finished products.

Storage is one of the...