One of those unexpected things...which only in hindsight do people then start emerging from the great woodlands of opinion to ask why there wasn't a Plan B.
Or even a sign above the ground warning there was a fuel pipeline running through those parts...which I can only assume there was.
Although the pilot of the excavator brought in to dig out buried swamp kauri (which is being cited as the cause of the initial damage) couldn't have seen it.
Whatever dinged the pipe though had enough power to cause it to eventually blow...and thus, fuel supplied to Auckland Airport, and the whole city for that matter, was disrupted.
Disrupted is a very gentle term...and I daresay many once-booked passengers had a harsher description of the situation.
And motorists for that matter because the pipe burst also meant supplies of petrol and diesel would be affected.
So, it was a case of find every available fuel tanker with a current WOF and rego and send them up to Marsden Pt, 170km north of Auckland, in a great posse, to be filled and sent back.
I had a vision of tankers parking up in Queen St and filling containers for long queues of stranded motorists...like they do when water runs out during an emergency.
In hindsight mode, it's easy to shake the head and sort of "tut tut" about the fact there was just one pipeline running down from the refinery to Auckland, but this is a rare situation I don't think too many people would have seen coming.
For there are many places in the world where it's one pipeline and that's that.
There were however some concerns about the vulnerability of having just one pipeline but those concerns only emerged loudly after this happened.
And at the end of the day it was accidental.
Not a system failure as such.
I guess the only positive was that repairs would be very good, and the entire line would likely be scanned and checked.
And fuel being the most vital commodity in this country, outside of fresh water, syrah, sausage rolls and electricity, the moves to get it flowing again were made immediately.
But hey, try telling that to anyone stuck with a grounded or cancelled flight.
We plan and store and prepare for potential emergencies like earthquakes and things but you can't really plan for something like this.
For it is "one of those things" that no one sees coming...until it arrives and then, as I noted earlier, the criticisms (some politically motivated of course) start seeping out of the woodwork of opinion.
Around the rest of the country it is not an issue, because the big shipping tankers fill up at Marsden Pt and take the stuff all around the place and put it in big tanks.
For many people up that way the potential shortage of fuel was a whole new thing, but for anyone who was running a car back in 1979 having to park it up for a day became a legal requirement.
The great "oil shock" of the '70s when prices soared meant the government at the time needed to find a way to use less...so from July 31 in the year of '79 they decreed that everyone who owned a car had to select a day of the week for it to be parked up...and were issued a coloured sticker which had to go on the windscreen indicating that day.
If you were caught driving on that day you got fined.
But this led to some great Kiwi ingenuity, because some people were able to get an "X" sticker which was an exemption if they needed it for a business reason.
Result?
The forgeries emerged in great numbers.
After a year the Government scrapped the scheme as it simply had not worked...people were still using the same amount of petrol they were using a year earlier.
And I was okay because I had a motorcycle and knew a bloke in aviation circles who sometimes gave me a top up of av-gas for it.
Boy, did it go.
Unlike a lot of Boeings last week.
