Forced Instant Tank Ignition

There is an interesting post over on LinkedIn where the author, Valerii Ivanov, introduces a new industrial safety term ‘forced instant tank ignition’. He uses this term to describe the type of conflagration that is increasingly being seen in the Persian Gulf region; the catastrophic failure and near instantaneous ignition of large petroleum product storage tanks caused by drone and missile strikes.

Ivanov makes the point that chemical safety programs are not equipped to protect facilities from these types of incidents. Tank failure sensors and fire suppression systems have not been designed to respond to the scope and speed of these military conflict-initiated incidents.

To be fair, safety programs have enough problems dealing with neglect, equipment failures, and human mistakes. Asking safety managers to deal with military strikes is certainly going beyond the scope of their training and fiscal support. Having said that, the current Iranian contretemps show that attacking critical industrial chemical facilities is a cheap route to effective asymmetric warfare with an impact well beyond the cost of the attack.

Ivanov points to investigating and implementing fire suppression systems that are capable of dealing with this type of instantaneous conflagration. While that would limit the effects of such attacks, safety engineering teaches that preventing incidents is more cost effective than mitigating their effects. Protecting chemical facilities from military scale drone and missile attacks is beyond the capabilities of facility security forces and requires a high-level look at the political and military calculus of point defense operations.

Smaller scale drone (both air and sea) attacks by paramilitary and terrorist forces, are certain to see an upturn in the number and effectiveness of attacks on chemical facilities after seeing their effectiveness clearly demonstrated. Facility security forces are almost certainly going to be called upon to conduct defense against these smaller scale attacks, even if government regulations continue to ignore the need for local counter drone operations.