Over the past 30 days (February–March 2026), more than 60 incidents have been recorded worldwide involving the complete or near-complete destruction of fuel storage tanks with capacities ranging from 5,000 to 75,000 tons. Hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of fuel have burned.

The environmental and economic damage amounts to billions of dollars.Virtually all affected tanks were equipped with modern fixed fire suppression systems, designed and certified in accordance with current industry standards. Nevertheless, these systems failed to prevent catastrophic fire development.

I am an engineer with more than 25 years of experience in the design and development of fire protection systems for flammable and combustible liquid storage tanks. I am not a politician or a military expert. My task is to determine whether systems work under real conditions.

Existing fixed fire protection systems, even when properly designed in accordance with current standards and equipped with certified components, do not provide real protection of the asset. The reality of March 2026 has made this boundary explicit: under modern impact scenarios — drone strikes, physical damage to tank roofs, bunds, and foam/water supply infrastructure, loss of power, and critical time loss in the first seconds — the visible non-functionality of these systems becomes undeniable.

For decades, industry frameworks have focused on optimizing individual components — primarily foam agents and delivery methods — rather than validating the performance of the fixed system as a whole.

Despite the technical feasibility of full-scale testing, the industry has not created a single full-scale test facility for large-diameter tanks. Materials from LASTFIRE explicitly state that tests on tanks larger than 30 meters in diameter are not conducted due to cost, and work is performed on significantly reduced-scale models (around 10–11 meters).

The fact remains: losses from just one month in 2026 exceed the cost of building a proper full-scale testing infrastructure not by multiples, but by thousands of times.

I have built two test tanks with diameters of 23 and 42 meters. This is technically feasible. This is not a question of excessive cost. This is a question of lack of decision and lack of will.

At the same time, the professional and public space lacks: — systemic conclusions regarding the failure of fixed systems; — concrete engineering recommendations.

This means the industry is either unable or unwilling to draw lessons at the scale of the events that have occurred.

Today, fundamental elements of engineering validation are missing:

— there is no standard that addresses a fixed tank fire protection system as a complete system; — there is no certification of the system as a functioning solution; — there is no full-scale validation under high heat flux, physical damage, and limited access conditions; — existing documents are limited to prescriptive requirements (flow rates, duration), without verifying actual performance.

This systemic gap has directly resulted in the loss of more than 60 tanks within weeks and hundreds of thousands of tons of fuel.

The only constructive path forward is the development of performance-based standards specifically for fixed tank protection systems.

Such standards must:

— address real damage scenarios, including drone/missile impact, loss of utilities, and infrastructure destruction; — require mandatory full-scale validation under high heat flux and restricted access conditions; — introduce strict requirements for redundancy, passive protection, and resilience of fixed elements; — evaluate actual system performance after initial impact, not theoretical design compliance.

Technical solutions already exist, their effectiveness has been proven, and they can be demonstrated through real full-scale testing.

If you represent an operator, asset owner, EPC contractor, insurer, or regulator — and are interested in real, not declarative, protection of critical infrastructure — I am open to professional engagement.

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