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Comment by tivert | Hacker News Reader

> I never understood the move of gas tanks from above ground to underground. The few stations left with above ground tanks were forced to bury them ages ago.

> To me, you can easily detect leaks if above ground and correct. The local Gov can even hire someone to check above ground tanks. Seems oil companies did the move to avoid inspections.

Above-ground tanks might be better for detecting leaks, but I'd imagine they're much more vulnerable to catastrophic accidents (e.g. a truck slamming into one and causing a giant fire).

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Heh, I did some work on a pretty cool tank monitoring hardware/software solution with a major fuel supplier here about a decade ago. They have facilities with about a dozen large vertical 40-80,000L above-ground fuel tanks for agricultural use. One of the features I was working on was leak detection, and we got the sensors and statistical analysis down to the point where, when testing with water, I could accurately detect the rate of evaporation from a smaller indoor tank.

Anyway, we’re in an area that doesn’t have a whole lot of “acts of God” kind of destruction; no hurricanes or earthquakes, high winds occasionally but tornados are quite rare, etc. They reported to me that the number one cause of leaks on their above-ground tanks was bullet holes. Just… people randomly shooting at the tank farms. They don’t catch fire when this happens generally, they just spill out from the hole until someone catches it and transfers all of the fuel out of the tank.

>Anyway, we’re in an area that doesn’t have a whole lot of “acts of God” kind of destruction

Are you in the US? And if so... mind sharing your vague region? I'd love to know where to actually avoid tornadoes.

One example: much of Pennsylvania has none of these.

Philly doesn't count as a natural disaster?

Saskatchewan in Western Canada. Just north of North Dakota and Montana. What we do get is wild amounts of cold and snow some years, but those don't generally harm fuel tanks a whole lot :).

Move to the Southwest. I moved to northern New Mexico and I love it. Nobody to bother me and miles of space for whatever I need to do. Gets hot though.

Do you not consider contaminating a city's water supply catastrophic

No, because that's not something that actually happens due to underground storage. The leaks are local, and cause minimal long term harm. They are not "contaminating a city's water supply", that's simply not true.

Its absolutely true, one of my city's primary aquifers is directly under ground. Future underground tanks will not be permitted because they've been leaking into the groundwater, especially if and when they're abandoned because the business failed.

So make failed businesses empty their fuel tanks? Seems like a dumb reason to regulate tanks for active businesses.

Failed businesses don't often fail because they executed things perfectly. When you bankruptcy and shut down, you don't necessarily sell property immediately.

That’s demonstrably false. Google the red hill fuel tanks

A truck slamming into an above-ground tank could easily contaminate a city's water supply, so I'm not sure you've got a valid argument here.

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