Jeff, I attended the Public Utilities Commission open meeting on Y2K held on Oct.22, 1998. Nevada Power is only 95% complete on its assessment according to an official document sent to a friend, and will be completed by Dec 98. At the meeting were the Y2K project leader (and of course Nev. Power's attournies). They stated that their budget for y2k is between $7 million and $15 million dollars. I asked them what they had spent so far, and their answer was "just under $2 million." Now, I'm no rocket scientist but if they don't even know how much they have to spend at this point, that makes me nervous. Even with their own numbers, having spent only 2 million since 1994 (when they claimed to have started on this project) is less than 1/3 of the budget on the low side, and about 15% of the high side. When are they going to spend this money to make the repairs? One thing that their project manager did admit to was, they have three main components to their systems (power generation, distribution, the third escapes me). They plan on testing each one separately, but will not be able to test all three together because they cannot take the entire system off line to do so (he wished they could, but claims it is not possible.) So even if they succeed in fixing the 3 systems separately, they will not know if they will all communicate with each other until its too late. Needless to say, I felt more uncomfortable when I left than when I arrived. Of course nothing was mentioned about this on the evening news or in the Las Vegas Desperate Sun. Only the standard lawyer garbage about "we are confident that we will be ready, blah, blah, blah"

Southwest Gas is another story. They claimed to have started code remediation in 1995 and are 71% complete. My question to them was simply, if you started in 3 1/2 years ago and have completed just over 2/3 of the code, you should take about 1 1/2 yrs to finish the rest. We have only 14 months left, and assuming you finish on time, this leaves no time for testing. Are you cutting it kind of close? They responded that they had completed the hardest part of the code repair already, and just had the easy parts left. They said they will be ready by June, 1999 and have six months to test. This is the biggest crock of bull I ever heard. While not a programmer, a good friend of mine who is in charge of Y2K for Nellis AFB says that the toughest part of any project is the last 10%, when you have to tie everything together. Don't plan on any warm showers on 1/1/00 (assuming the water and power works, which doesn't look good at this point).

-- Anonymous, November 09, 1998