Nope. The more likely answer is they were trying to get work done in parallel with the paperwork so that By the time the approval was ready to use the tanks, th

Nope. The more likely answer is they were trying to get work done in parallel with the paperwork so that By the time the approval was ready to use the tanks, they had already been built instead of requiring these things to be done in series. I suppose it is up to the regulators how they want to enforce this, but it seems like they were going to wait on actually using the tanks until it was actually approved, but the regulators thought there was too much risk they could use them anyway. If they were just trying to skirt the law they wouldn’t have applied for a permit for five of the tanks anyway. It’s kind of hard to tell from a popular media article what the reality of the regulatory situation is. Sometimes mere /concerns/ and notes by regulators can be upgraded to “violations” by the press. Everyone just kind of read between the lines and unless you’re an actual expert in the topic it’s super easy for a journalist or (more likely) an editor to try to spin a certain narrative in order to get engagement. And this can happen not due to intention to deceive but simply because the editor isn’t very familiar with the topic.