Safe fluid storage: an engineer's guide to secondary and tertiary containment

The purpose of this EEMUA Online Publication 301 is to provide engineers with a reference guide to good and best practice for secondary and tertiary containment of liquids and gases on an industrial scale - and to assist learning by sharing experiences of past incidents and lessons learnt.

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Secondary containment of above-ground storage tanks is often accomplished using a tank bund. An introduction to the subject of tank bunding can be found in the publically available encyclopedias such as wikipedia.

Bunding is a legal requirement in many countries, particularly around storage vessels and other plant that contain liquids which may be dangerous or hazardous to the environment.

Examples which receive specific attention in the UK, the rest of Europe and the USA are: oil and fuel storage tanks; and transformers at electricity sub-stations, which are filled with oil for cooling and insulation purposes.

Here are links to some current regulations in Europe.

Here are details of some incidents involving “loss of containment” from secondary and tertiary storage systems for bulk fluids.

In this good_practice section, some published guidance is summarised; and operators of storage facilities share their users' views, experiences and recommendations.

In this section, users of storage facilities share their views, experiences and recommendations on what constitutes best_practice.

In this section there are some available references on bund overtopping

For more details of the EEMUA Storage Tanks Committee, or the EEMUA civil and structural engineering work group, visit the EEMUA website or call EEMUA on +44 (0)20 7621 0011.

EEMUA also runs training and competency certification courses for tank assessors.