Them’s the breaks?

increased holding capacity for the airport.

The damage of this sorely restricted fuel supply is going to be considerable. As for accountability, straight away we can predict the components of a round of Cock Robin.

Not our fault, says the Government. This was a privately owned pipeline because things work more efficiently that way. And, frankly, Energy Minister Judith Collins would have expected better contingency plans.

Not our fault, says the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. We came up with a report on the risks (assessed at, gee, one big bust every century or two) and found that the most sensible strategy was to plan to hit the roads with tankers from around New Zealand and from our rapidly summonsed Anzac buddies.

Nobody much cried out out against this notion, it seems, apart from those worrywarts at Air New Zealand, saying something about serious underestimation of the actual, let alone reputational, costs to the nation from a fuel-starved airport.

Not our fault, says pipeline owner Refining NZ. We had warning signs all around that pipeline; what can we do if some clown on a digger chooses to disregard the warnings?

Not my fault, says the digger driver. If there were signs, they were overgrown with weeds. And there you have it. Whoever is responsible for those weeds owes the nation maybe hundreds of millions of dollars.

So under this slightly giddy scenario the buck stops at a place far removed from anyone who’s in a position to do a whole hell of a lot in terms of compensation.

Obviously this may prove to be too simplistic, let alone cynical, an expectation.

Maybe someone will actually put their hands up.

Or maybe the parties will collectively acknowledge that this was simply one of those risks that they were all collectively prepared to run, provided we weren’t individually going to be accountable for it.