Many of the State's fire officers can tell you horror stories of petrol storage tanks being located under shops, in many cases without any of the required 700-gallon overflow-catch walls which will stop any spillage from flowing down through a town's sewerage system.
In one case, for instance, the manhole cover over a tank is under a mat behind the counter in a grocery shop.
This time last year, the HSA said it was "targeting" old petrol stations with new guidelines aimed at the detection of leaks.
Apart from the dangers of a tanker travelling on the road network, there are also risks involved at the unloading, particularly in the delivery of petrol to filling stations.
Fire authorities have tightened up standards significantly in recent years, and many of the State's filling stations have had to replace tanks and delivery pumps to reach current standards.
Oil companies are obliged to deliver only to a nominated and trained "competent person" in any filling station, and the major companies often do no-warning "spot checks" on the filling stations during deliveries.
However, though they have been illegal for many years, the continuing existence of kerbside petrol pumps in many parts of the State constitute another worry for the fire authorities.
It seems there are annual derogations given to many of those outlets that still exist, because there's no apparent political will to finally have them closed down.
Indeed, there's a "circular" situation where fire authorities won't approve a licence for particular outlets, and the local authority won't complete the processing of the applications because of this, but as long as the outlet has an application for a licence on file, the fire authority can't prosecute.