This is, of course, a bowdlerised version of the famous phrase in the 1994 movie Forrest Gump, and either of these phrases could equally apply to Western Australia's Varanus Island gas fire, except Slugcatcher thinks such a pithy explanation would be only partly right.
Varanus happened because "stuff happens" and because - as in the US Government's clumsy liberation of Iraq - bad policy let it happen.
Going a step further, there is another point to make. After "it" happened, a cascade of events occurred that underlines the point that Varanus was not simply the result of a piece of steel piping failing or bad luck. It was combination of these, with gross government incompetence layered over the top.
The really sad part about all this is that the people in government who forced a single-gas processing point option on the northwest oil and gas industry are the same people in charge of fixing the problem.
This issue seems to have escaped everyone so far, but critical lesson from Varanus is not about better steel, better design, or better management. It's all about not putting your eggs in one basket.
At Varanus, a number of gas-owning companies delivered their product to a single concentrated processing centre. Perhaps that was about saving money. Perhaps it was about no single project having the scale to justify its own separate, onshore, processing centre.
But perhaps it was also about the WA Government and the environmental extremists employed to advise it, who said a single, concentrated gas-processing centre, is necessary to save the northwest coast from over-development.
Give dear old Slugcatcher a break. Have any of these people ever seen the thousands (not hundreds) of kilometres of barren, fly-blown, coastline that is Australia's northwest coast? It's the same stretch of godforsaken coast that William Dampier first sighted in 1688 - he told everyone it was worthless scrubby desert, and he was right.
The dark greens, who dislike any form of change, investment, or job creation, have been spreading a story for years that Dampier was wrong; that the northwest coast is a fragile, pristine, environment. Yeah right, and what cyclones do to it three or four times a year is far more than man could ever do in 100 years.
The point of this little rant is that the dark greens continue to claim that there are virtually no sites along the northwest suitable as a gas processing centre, and certainly not any for a second liquefied natural gas manufacturing facility.
Oh no, they say, the only acceptable solution is to cram everything onto the one site to save the coastline and the remote offshore islands from the tyranny of industrial development.
This argument, which the WA Government has swallowed hook, line and sinker, lies at the core of the mess which is Varanus. It is why mineral processing companies are cutting production, why workers are losing their jobs, and why this policy of concentration is utter folly.
Worse than losing gas for local industry there is the really "big one" lurking in the background - the inability of the WA Government to develop an LNG-friendly planning process which might drive some developers across into the Northern Territory in their hunt for landing sites.
Hopefully, someone in government will see the mistakes made in the past and recognise that it has been getting dud advice.
If that happens, and if a carefully thought-out energy policy evolves in the wake of the Varanus fire then some good might come from the experience.
But that comes back to the original, and very worrying, point.
There are even worse things than having Donald Rumsfeld or Forrest Gump running your state. The same people who erred in the first place are now the people being asked to admit their mistakes (always a hard thing to do), and to come up with a better policy - even harder when you still believe that the original one was best.
