Refining NZ’s 170-kilometre Auckland fuel pipeline burst on September 16, 2017, causing massive setbacks to its customers for 9 days.

Refining NZ says that the damage to the pipeline (70,000 litres of leaked fuel) was caused by an unidentified digger operator that may have happened as early as 2014.
The pipeline burst grounding many Auckland flights for 9 days and severely limited the fuel supply for ground transportation.

The pipeline is back up and running, but the damage to businesses, that were basically put out of operation for over a week, are looking for compensation. Refining NZ said that some customers have told them that they are waiting for the company’s findings into the incident before determining whether they can pursue damages or if force majeure provisions in their contracts will hold up. Force majeure absolves a company of financial liability if an event is outside of their control and the event caused the company to be unable to meet their contractual obligations.

Burst Pipeline in Auckland

So, what happens when you can’t access site data locally? If you have a server (even personal computer used to capture scale data) what happens when the machine dies or is interrupted? Like the pipeline crisis, where businesses can’t access their server and/or local data, we experienced a digger cutting the fibre cable that provided client machine access to their server located onsite.

With WZ multi-master database replication and redundancy, client machines automatically rerouted and connected to the next available online server. Operations continued as usual.

Considering the pipeline was broken for over a week, we can only imagine the chaos if businesses were forced to use manual dockets for 2 days let alone 9. Our clients don’t have to worry about IT infrastructure downtime or interrupted business operations because our passion is delivering smart software solutions and this why our loader scales and loader scale software is online and offline ready as well.

Have you been following the story? Do you think that Refining NZ was negligent or was this situation out of their control?