A fuel dispensing facility concentrates its hazard at a small number of well-understood points, which makes it one of the more prescriptively regulated occupancies in NFPA 30A. The dispenser island is where flammable liquid is transferred at grade, by untrained members of the public, immediately adjacent to running vehicles. Everything about the code treatment follows from controlling that transaction and limiting what happens when it goes wrong.
The controls are specific and largely mechanical. Emergency shutoff devices have to be reachable from a location that is safe to approach during a fire, not from beside the dispenser itself. Impact protection keeps a vehicle strike from shearing a dispenser off its base. Shear valves at the dispenser base close automatically if that happens anyway. Hose breakaway couplings separate cleanly when a customer drives off with the nozzle still inserted, which happens with predictable regularity. Each of these addresses a specific and well-documented failure mode.
In South Florida the operational context adds a dimension. Hurricane preparation produces extraordinary dispensing volume over short periods, with long queues, extended continuous operation, and customers filling portable containers in quantity. That is the period of highest throughput, highest congestion, and highest likelihood of an improperly handled container, and it is also the period when equipment that has been marginal all year is most likely to fail. The condition of the emergency controls matters most precisely when they are hardest to reach.