Despite receiving widespread media and general public attention due to third party damages, the property damage value of the Buncefield incident was small compared to other catastrophic incidents experienced by the hydrocarbon industry. From a review of the 100 largest property damage losses, around 70 are attributed to fires, explosions, and/or vapor cloud explosions (Marsh, 2012). These are all incidents where the fire and gas detection system played, or could have played, an important role in preventing further damages after loss of containment. The number of incidents remains high, and the data do not indicate a decreasing trend. BSEE
(2012) data for the US outer continental shelf attributed a total of 1612 incidents to fires and explosions from 1996 to 2011 (Not including 2006), 649 of them in the period from 20072011. HSE
(2007) data from 1980 to 2005 for floating offshore units attributed a total of 296 incidents to fires and explosions, 235 of them in the period from 19902005. The Petroleum Safety Authority (2012) reported that there is not significant statistical evidence to support the idea that there has been a reduction in the number of leaks per facility year in the Norwegian continental shelf. This conclusion
was obtained for leak rates greater than 0.1 kg/s, and compared
data from 2011 against the average for the period 20032010.
Furthermore, the HSE (1997, 2003) reported that less than 50% of
the known releases in offshore facilities are detected by the facility's
gas detection system. If unknown releases are considered, the
actual fraction of releases detected is even lower.