【正文】
n October 28,1999, a spark from a man lift with two employees in PoncaCity, Oklahoma, USA ignited vapors (Perssonamp。s regulations concerning hot work and NFPA39。 USNOAO, 1999). There were 114 occurred in North America, 72 in Asia and 38 in Europe (Table 1). USA had 105 accidents reviewed because of the easy accessibility to accident information. As indicated in Table 2, accidents occurred more frequently at petroleum refineries with 116 cases (%). The second mostfrequently involved place was terminals andpumping stations (64 cases, %). Only % of accidents occurred in petrochemical plants (%), oil fields (%), and other types of industrial facilities (%)such as power plants, gas plants, pipelines, fertilizer plants, etc. Crude oil, gasoline and oil products such as fuel oil, diesel,etc. were major contents (Table 3). The atmospheric external floating roof tank was the most frequent type and the atmospheric cone top tank was the second most frequent type. Both types were used extensively for the storage of crude oil, gasoline,Fire was and diesel oil (Table 4).the most frequent type of loss with 145 cases and explosion was the second most frequent type of losswith 61 cases as indicated in Table 5. Fire and explosion together accounted for 85% of total cases. Oil spill and toxic gas/liquid release were the third and the fourth most frequent, respectively. The tank body distortion and the worker39。 ICHemE, 2021。 Lees,1996), CSB incident news (USCSB, 20212021) and databases (UQ, 2021。 2021。 2021。 1987). Most panies follow those standards and guidelines in the design, construction and operation, but tank accidents still occur. Learning from the past history is definitely important for the future safe operation of storage tanks. The purpose of this paper is to categorize the causes that lead to 242 tank accidents occurred in last 40 years. The fishbone diagram (The cause and effect diagram) invented by Dr Kaoru Ishikawa (Ishikawa and Lu, 1985) is used to summarize the effects and the causes that create or contribute to those effects. We hope that this work will be beneficial to tank operators and engineers. 2. Overall statistics The information of 242 tank accidents reviewed in this work was collected from published reports (March and Mclennan, 1990。 NFPA, 1992。 1990。1993。A study of storage tank accidents James I. Changa, ChengChung Linb 【 Abstract】 This paper reviews 242 accidents of storage tanks that occurred in industrial facilities over last 40 years. Fishbone Diagram is applied to analyze the causes that lead to accidents. Corrective actions are also provided to help operating engineers handling similar situations in the future. The results show that 74% of accidents occurred in petroleum refineries, oil terminals or storage. Fire and explosion account for 85%of the accidents. There were 80 accidents (33%) caused by lightning and 72 (30