Night-time at a major port is a study in organised compression. Containers stack into temporary skylines; tank farms sit behind berms that look reassuring until one remembers what they are designed to contain; cables, pipes and fibre run with the quiet certainty of a balance sheet. Everything is engineered for throughput. Almost nothing is engineered for flame.
Fire risk has not disappeared from buildings. It has simply migrated to places that behave less like buildings and more like systems: ports, pipeline rights-of-way, rail-linked industrial zones, data centres, refineries, LNG terminals, battery storage yards, cold-chain warehouses and the logistics corridors between them. These sites share an awkward characteristic. They are where modern economies have concentrated their physical optionality — the ability to move energy, goods and information — and yet they are often protected by fire-response models designed for municipal streets and ordinary structures.
This is not a critique of firefighters. It is an observation about geometry, governance and capital logic. Critical infrastructure corridors are large, open, windy, fuel-rich, electrically dense, and frequently distant from reliable water. They are also, increasingly, regulated in ways that complicate the traditional playbook. In that environment, “more of the same” is not a strategy; it is a comforting habit.
The corridor is the new building
The modern economy has done something subtle. It has reduced inventory and expanded interdependence. In doing so, it has made a small number of high-capacity nodes disproportionately important. Maritime transport remains the backbone of global trade — over 80% of world trade by volume is carried by sea — which means ports are not merely local assets but global synchronisation points. When chokepoints fail, costs propagate quickly, and the vulnerable are hit hardest. That was the message of UN Trade and Development’s recent work on maritime disruption: trade has recovered, but resilience remains fragile, with geopolitical and climate pressures forcing rerouting and raising costs across supply chains. [UNCTAD Review of Maritime Transport 2024]
Fire sits uncomfortably within that picture because it does not respect organisational charts. A port fire does not politely remain within a lease boundary; it exports itself — via smoke, contamination, evacuation zones, closed gates, stranded vessels and suddenly unavailable berths. A tank farm fire does something similar, except with a more direct influence on energy prices and industrial continuity. A data centre fire is less photogenic but arguably more destabilising: it interrupts transactions, communications and the quiet administrative plumbing of modern states.
One could treat these events as discrete “incidents”. That is how most reporting frames them. The more accurate frame is service interruption — and the economics of interruption are rarely linear. The World Bank’s work on infrastructure resilience has long argued that disruptions, not just damage, are where the real costs accumulate, harming firms, employment and competitiveness. The macro point is simple: when infrastructure stops, economies pay in ways that are not captured by the repair invoice. [World Bank Lifelines 2019]
What has changed is not that fire is new, but that its consequences now map more directly onto national performance. A warehouse fire in the wrong place can behave like a trade sanction. A terminal closure can mimic a currency shock, particularly for import-dependent economies. The corridor has become a macro instrument — just not one any central bank controls.
Fire as a trade and capital event
Investors and policymakers tend to treat fire as an insurable, operational risk — a matter for loss prevention teams, not strategy committees. That division of labour made sense when the loss profile was mainly property damage within a single enterprise. It makes less sense when downtime cascades across counterparties and sovereign systems.
The world is also in the middle of a large-scale reallocation of capital into energy and electrification. The International Energy Agency expects global energy investment to rise to a record $3.3 trillion in 2025, with around $2.2 trillion going to “clean technologies” and $1.1 trillion to oil, gas and coal. Solar alone is expected to attract about $450 billion in 2025, while grid investment — roughly $400 billion per year — is still failing to keep pace with electrification. [IEA World Energy Investment 2025]
This matters for fire risk for a prosaic reason: new capital creates new concentrations. Grids, storage, high-voltage substations, inverter stations, hydrogen-adjacent industrial zones and battery logistics all introduce ignition sources and fuel types that do not behave like yesterday’s risks. At the same time, the insurance system that historically softened industrial volatility is under stress from natural catastrophe losses. Swiss Re and Munich Re’s recent figures show insured catastrophe losses repeatedly exceeding $100 billion annually, with wildfires and severe convective storms now capable of producing record loss years. [Swiss Re Institute natural catastrophe losses 2025] [Munich Re natural disaster figures 2025]
In that environment, large industrial fires are no longer competing for attention only with other industrial losses. They are competing with a global re-pricing of risk. The result is not simply higher premiums; it is sharper terms, tighter capacity and a more demanding definition of “protection”.
Put bluntly: if a port authority believes fire preparedness is expensive, it has not priced the alternative correctly.
Why conventional firefighting models are structurally insufficient
The conventional model assumes three things: water is nearby; access is predictable; and the event is sized such that escalation can be contained by incremental resource mobilisation. Critical infrastructure corridors violate all three.
Water is the first constraint. Large-scale industrial firefighting is fundamentally a hydraulics problem dressed in protective clothing. Standards for flammable liquid fires make this explicit. NFPA 11 sets minimum foam application rates measured in litres per minute per square metre; when scaled to a storage tank or large bunded area, the implied flows are vast and sustained. A hydrocarbon tank scenario at 6.5 L/min/m² is not unusual in standard design logic; apply that to a 60-metre diameter tank and the foam solution rate alone is on the order of tens of thousands of litres per minute, before cooling water for adjacent exposures is considered. [NFPA 11 Standard for Foam 2005]
Access is the second constraint. Ports and energy hubs are designed for controlled movement, not emergency manoeuvre. They contain pinch points, high-security zones, rail interfaces, narrow service roads, and areas where smoke management is as critical as flame control. Even where equipment exists — fireboats, fixed monitors, ring mains — the event’s centre of gravity may be physically awkward: a container stack adjacent to hazardous storage; a ship alongside a berth; a tank bund where radiant heat excludes human entry.
Escalation is the third constraint. Corridor assets are built for continuity and high utilisation; they are not built for graceful degradation. The difference between a contained fire and a multi-day shutdown is often measured in minutes, yet mutual aid and reinforcements are typically measured in hours. That gap is where “structural insufficiency” lives.
The 2019 Intercontinental Terminals Company tank farm fire in Deer Park, Texas, is instructive not because it is unique, but because it is legible. The US Chemical Safety Board’s final report describes how a fire that began at one tank spread and ultimately destroyed fifteen 80,000-barrel aboveground storage tanks, burning for three days. [US Chemical Safety Board ITC Deer Park Final Report 2023] The municipal and environmental aftermath was also revealing: the City of Deer Park’s updates recorded the removal of roughly 1.5 million gallons of product mixed with water and firefighting foam from the tank farm and surrounding waterways. [City of Deer Park ITC Fire Updates 2019]
Those figures hint at the hidden ledger of firefighting at scale: runoff, contaminated water management, foam inventory, and the secondary logistics of environmental compliance. Fire is not merely an emergency; it is a temporary industrial process with its own supply chain.
A second example sits in Matanzas, Cuba, where a lightning strike ignited a crude oil storage facility fire in August 2022, with multiple tanks involved over subsequent days. International reporting and incident documentation emphasised the operational and humanitarian strain of sustained firefighting under constrained resources. [NOAA IncidentNews Matanzas 2022] [UN Cuba Matanzas Fire Situation Report 2022] The specifics are less important than the pattern: when an energy hub burns, the limiting factor is rarely courage; it is sustained capacity.
The new ignition sources are travelling through ports
Industrial fire has always been a risk around hydrocarbons. What is changing is that the “cargo mix” of modern trade is becoming more electrically energetic and, in places, more chemically ambiguous.
Insurers have been unusually direct about this. Allianz’s Safety and Shipping Review notes a decade-high number of fire incidents across vessel types in 2024 (250), with around 30% involving container, cargo or ro-ro vessels. It also highlights mis-declared cargo as a chief contributing cause to container ship fires, with the electrification age increasing the stakes. [Allianz Safety and Shipping Review 2025]
This is not a purely maritime problem. The same goods that burn at sea are booked, stored, moved and sometimes repaired onshore — in terminals, warehouses, inland depots and intermodal yards. The more the cargo consists of lithium-ion batteries, electric vehicles, energy storage components and chemically complex goods, the more any weak link in declaration, packaging, charging, damage inspection or segregation becomes a potential ignition point.
The TT Club, operating at the sharp end of logistics claims, has repeatedly returned to cargo misdeclaration and the need for tighter processes in the booking chain, noting that large-scale losses can be driven by dangerous cargoes that enter the supply chain incorrectly — sometimes through bad actors, often through mistakes and information failure. [TT Club Loss Prevention Year in Focus 2023]
A modern corridor therefore faces a peculiar asymmetry: the risk may be introduced by a small administrative error, while the consequence expresses itself as a major infrastructure event.
Data centres are infrastructure now, whether we admit it or not
It is tempting to exclude data centres from a discussion of fire in ports and energy assets. That would be a category error. Data centres have become part of the corridor economy because they sit where power, connectivity and land-use permissions coincide — and because their downtime behaves like a financial event.
The International Energy Agency’s recent analysis on energy and AI provides a hard anchor: data centre electricity consumption is concentrated, with the United States, Europe and China accounting for around 85% of global data centre electricity consumption today. It estimates US data centres consumed around 180 TWh in 2024, roughly 45% of global total, and notes the acceleration in growth rates since 2015. [IEA Energy and AI 2025]
From a fire-risk lens, this is not merely about server rooms. It is about the supporting ecosystem: UPS battery rooms, diesel storage, switchgear, cable tunnels and cooling infrastructure. These are high-consequence nodes that, like ports, are designed for uptime and tolerate disruption poorly. Traditional firefighting can be physically constrained by clean-agent systems, compartmentation choices, and the operational need to avoid collateral damage from water. Yet the corridor-level reality remains: when a data centre fails, the effects travel instantly.
The strategic point is that “critical infrastructure” has quietly expanded. Fire governance has not always expanded with it.
Regulation is rewriting the firefighting playbook
The corridor fire problem is being tightened, from two directions, by regulation and by environmental constraint.
The first is the gradual exit from PFAS-containing firefighting foams. Whatever one thinks of the politics, the operational implications are real. ECHA’s guidance on transitioning to fluorine-free foams makes clear that the regulatory landscape is moving towards restrictions, transition periods, and requirements for management plans, with a practical emphasis on system cleaning, waste handling and planning for safe substitution. [ECHA Guidance for Transitioning to Fluorine-Free Firefighting Foams 2025]
The implication is that industrial operators cannot assume “stockpile and spray” will remain socially or legally acceptable in the way it once was. Foam strategy becomes a governance issue: what is held on site, who is authorised to deploy it, how runoff is contained, and how a facility demonstrates compliance without degrading safety.
The second pressure is that water itself is becoming a contested resource. This is not always framed as a fire issue, yet it is increasingly relevant. Climate-driven volatility and competing municipal demands complicate the assumption that large volumes of water can be drawn at short notice without political or operational friction. This matters most for corridor assets that are adjacent to populations — ports embedded in cities, industrial zones near residential expansion, and energy hubs that sit at the intersection of economic and environmental sensitivity.
In short, the corridor is being asked to do more with less: more electrification, more throughput, more density — while some traditional suppression tools become harder to use.
The governance problem: no one owns the full risk
Corridor fire risk is a governance puzzle disguised as an emergency.
Ports and industrial zones are typically governed through layered authority: port landlord models, private terminal operators, concession agreements, municipal fire services, national customs and security agencies, and, in many cases, privately funded industrial brigades. Each party has a rational mandate. The overall system often has an irrational gap.
The Dutch approach offers a clue to how this can be handled. The Joint Fire Brigade in Rotterdam was founded through collaboration between municipalities and an industrial cooperative, bringing together public authority and private capability for a high-hazard port environment. [Gezamenlijke Brandweer Rotterdam – About] The Port of Rotterdam’s own vision documents have long recognised that specialised emergency response is not optional but intrinsic to operating an industrial port at scale. [Port of Rotterdam Port Vision]
This is not a template that can be copied wholesale. It is, however, a reminder that corridor fire capacity is not simply “a service”. It is a form of shared infrastructure, closer to a utility than a discretionary operating cost.
Procurement signals are beginning to reflect this. In the Netherlands, public tendering has included water transport systems for emergency response, implying that authorities are willing to treat high-volume water movement as a strategic capability rather than a niche tool. [TenderNed Watertransport Systeem – Veiligheidsregio Amsterdam-Amstelland 2023]
The broader point is that corridor resilience needs an entity that can legitimately invest in shared capacity and compel participation. Without that, preparedness becomes voluntary — and voluntary preparedness is usually what gets trimmed when budgets tighten.
Water is the constraint that decides the outcome
Once a corridor fire grows beyond initial attack, the fight becomes less about tactics and more about sustained supply: water, foam, power for pumps, and safe access for personnel and unmanned systems. In many ports and industrial zones, water is plentiful in theory and unavailable in practice. It is nearby, but not deliverable at the right pressure, in the right quantity, for the right duration, at the right point.
This is where “distance-agnostic water delivery” becomes strategically interesting. The concept is straightforward: if water is the limiting reagent, then the ability to move large volumes of water rapidly over long distances — from open water, remote hydrant networks, or alternative sources — changes the containment envelope.
Hytrans is a useful technical case study here precisely because it illustrates what “distance-agnostic” can mean in practice without requiring a permanent build. Its mobile pump units and hose systems are designed to draw from open water sources and deliver high flows over distance. The HydroSub 1200 unit, for example, is specified at 30,000 litres per minute at 12 bar with a 10-metre pump lift, and can be configured for far higher flow rates in flood modules. [Hytrans HydroSub 1200 specifications] Hytrans’ hose systems run up to 12-inch (300 mm) diameters, explicitly aimed at high-volume transport with rapid coupling. [Hytrans Hoses specifications]
The relevance is not the brand; it is the capability class. A corridor that can create a temporary, high-capacity “water backbone” has options that a corridor reliant solely on fixed hydrants and municipal supply does not. It can support sustained cooling of exposures, feed high-capacity monitors, and maintain pressure over large operational footprints.
One should be careful not to turn this into technology theatre. Water transport is not a substitute for prevention, detection, segregation or disciplined hazardous cargo handling. It is what allows those systems to remain meaningful when prevention fails — which it occasionally will.
A recent industrial fire in Ulsan, South Korea, reported locally as a major oil tank fire at a petrochemical hub in February 2025, illustrates the kind of event where speed and volume are decisive. [KBS World oil tank incident Ulsan 2025] Hytrans’ own deployment reference claims containment within hours using a high-flow monitor supplied by its mobile system, with reported flows of 45,000 litres per minute. [Hytrans Tankfire South Korea deployment reference] Even allowing for the natural incentives of a manufacturer’s narrative, the underlying logic is sound: containment time is a function of how quickly sufficient agent can be applied at scale.
In corridor terms, distance-agnostic water delivery is not “firefighting kit”. It is a resilience instrument.
What changes when water becomes mobile
If one accepts that corridor fire risk is systemic, not local, a different set of questions follows. They are less about heroics and more about governance design.
The first question is whether the corridor can sustain operations under partial failure. Ports are excellent at throughput under normal conditions and less practised at constrained operation under emergency. Yet the economic objective in many fire scenarios is not immediate resumption of full activity; it is controlled continuity — keeping some gates open, maintaining safe navigation, prioritising critical cargoes, and protecting adjacent assets from cascading involvement.
The second question is whether the corridor has pre-arranged hydraulic optionality. That is not a poetic phrase; it is a practical one. It means knowing where water can be taken from, how it can be moved, what flow rates are achievable, how quickly systems can be deployed, and who has authority to do so. It also means rehearsing environmental containment alongside suppression, because contaminated runoff is not an afterthought; it is part of the incident.
The third question is whether the corridor has aligned incentives. Many operators will invest heavily in on-site systems that benefit their own asset, while underinvesting in shared systems that primarily reduce contagion risk. This is rational at the firm level and suboptimal at the corridor level. The only durable fixes tend to be institutional: collective fire brigades, pooled equipment, mandated contribution models, and governance structures that treat emergency response as part of the operating licence.
The fourth question concerns underwriting and finance. Lenders and insurers increasingly ask whether risk controls are credible under realistic scenarios, not only compliant on paper. In an era where catastrophe losses are repeatedly rewriting risk appetites, “credible” often means demonstrable: tested water supply, proven foam performance under transition constraints, robust incident command, and clear mutual aid agreements.
A corridor that cannot answer these questions will eventually answer them involuntarily, in public.
Why this matters now, without the drama
It is fashionable to claim every risk is “growing”. Fire risk does not need rhetorical inflation. The corridor thesis is enough: economies have concentrated physical throughput and digital continuity into a smaller number of high-consequence nodes, while simultaneously changing the fuel mix of trade and constraining some traditional suppression tools.
At the same time, the scale of current investment in energy systems means the value at stake is rising, and the tolerance for multi-day outages is shrinking. [IEA World Energy Investment 2025] Meanwhile, the broader insurance environment is contending with repeated years of outsized catastrophe losses, which tightens the conditions under which industrial risk is financed. [Swiss Re Institute natural catastrophe losses 2025] [Munich Re natural disaster figures 2025]
Against that backdrop, corridor fire resilience begins to look less like a safety programme and more like a strategic competence — the ability to keep trade and energy moving when a local event tries to become a systemic one.
The contrarian point is simple. We spend vast sums optimising throughput and comparatively little ensuring the corridor can survive its own failure modes. The result is a system that is efficient in sunshine and fragile in smoke.
Closing thought: resilience is not a slogan; it is plumbing
There is a certain managerial comfort in treating fire as an operational matter, to be delegated and audited. In corridor infrastructure, delegation is necessary but not sufficient. The meaningful decisions sit higher: how risk is owned, how shared capacity is funded, how water is made deliverable at scale, and how transition constraints in foam and environmental regulation are handled without quietly degrading real capability.
Distance-agnostic water delivery is one of the more practical levers available because it targets the limiting factor directly. It is also modular and scalable — the sort of capability institutions can adopt without rebuilding entire ports or energy hubs. Used intelligently, it complements fixed systems, fireboats, ring mains and industrial brigades; it does not replace them. The value is not in novelty. It is in restoring optionality.
In a world where the corridor is the economy, fire resilience is no longer an internal matter. It is part of national competitiveness, energy security and the quiet credibility of infrastructure finance.
No one needs a new vocabulary for this. They need a better map, a clearer mandate, and more water in the right place at the right time.
