AS 4897-2008 is the Australian Standard behind the term SIRA, statistical inventory reconciliation analysis, and if you operate underground fuel tanks, it’s the standard your loss monitoring is measured against. Here’s what it actually asks of you, without the jargon.
The idea. Underground tanks can’t be inspected by looking at them. The standard’s answer: treat your daily records, dips, sales and deliveries, as evidence, and analyse a month of them statistically to determine whether fuel is going missing. Done properly, this method detects losses far too small to see day to day, at a threshold defined in the standard (0.76 litres per hour, roughly 18 litres a day).
What it requires from the site. Honest inputs. A measured dip for each tank each day, sales per tank from your POS, and deliveries recorded on the day they land at docket quantity. That’s the operator’s whole job under the method. There’s no equipment to buy and nothing to install; the standard was written so that a well-run site with a dip stick can achieve the same leak detection confidence as one with expensive hardware.
What it requires of the analysis. This is where the myths creep in. A spreadsheet showing daily ins and outs is not SIRA, and neither is the stock module in your POS. The standard requires a statistical analysis of the month’s reconciliation data, with defined thresholds, applied consistently, and documented. It’s a mathematical method with acceptance criteria, not a bookkeeping exercise. That’s also why the “my fuel supplier’s portal does it” answer deserves scrutiny: whoever runs your analysis should be independent of the fuel being analysed, and you should know who is actually doing the mathematics behind the badge.
What you keep. Records. Monthly reports, retained and producible. When an auditor, insurer, site purchaser or the EPA asks what leak monitoring you had in place, a stack of monthly SIRA reports is the answer that ends the conversation. In several states, documented loss monitoring is baked into underground storage regulations; in all of them, it’s what protects you when something does go wrong.
A tank test every few years covers me, right? Not quite. A tightness test is a snapshot of one day. The standard exists because leaks start between tests, and monthly reconciliation is what catches them while the fix is cheap.
The standard asks the site for five disciplined minutes a day, and asks the analyst for defensible mathematics every month. Get both right and compliance stops being a worry and becomes a filing habit.
