This is an excerpt from Sunday's Chicago Tribune- a superb look at the international aspects of Y2K. It included this excerpt:

**As part of an experiment last year, technicians at the huge Xingo hydroelectric dam on Brazil's Sao Francisco River set the dates on the plant's main computer forward to Jan. 1, 2000.

**What happened next is still sending chills through Latin America.

**"When they put the date forward, the whole control board went haywire," remembers Marcos Ozorio, one of the members of Brazil's presidential Year 2000 commission. "Twelve thousand warning lights flashed all across the board, with all kinds of alarm information."

**Technicians quickly switched back the date, and are now ferreting out the plant's Y2K bugs. But "if you had been surprised by a situation like this, what you'd have had to do is shut down the plant until you found where the failures were," Ozorio said. "Automatically you'd be taking off the energy board 30 percent of northeast Brazil."

The link for the story is:

A global warning on Y2K

-- Anonymous, March 22, 1999

Answers

This is an excellent article, Drew. I think the Tribune reporters did a good job of researching Y2K status in other countries, and putting it all together in a composite whole. Thanks for posting it -- you're a gem!

I found another sentence in this piece which might have utilitiy implications since part of Mexico is in our Western grid Interconnection:

"Mexican officials say they expect to have all the government's computer bugs fixed well in advance of the end of the year, but the U.S. Senate recently classified Mexico as one of the large countries that had fallen nine months to two years behind schedule in dealing with Y2K."

-- Anonymous, March 22, 1999

Hmmm. Plant fails. They set-back the date, and all is well.

I realize that a lot of the most knowledeable people say that dates can't be set back on 1/1/2000, but stories like this make Y2K seem like a non-issue. It sounds to outsiders like myself that all they have to do is set the dates back (maybe to 1990?).

-- Anonymous, March 23, 1999

No no no no no no no!

What part of this don't people get: computers are not human. They can't reason; they only follow a string of commands.

Let me put it this way: if you were born in 1930 and retired in 1995, you would probably be receiving monthly social security checks. If the date in the SSA computers were to be rolled back to 1990, guess what?, you are no longer retired (after all, the computer thinks the current date is 1990 and that you were born in 1930). Ergo, no checks for you!

Rollbacks may be a solution for a minority of systems (mostly small, stand-alone systems), but not for the majority of systems.

Maybe this disconnect stems from the fact that certain "experts" have said that Y2K is a simple problem of large proportions. Not true! This is a rather complicated, multi-faceted problem of large proportions. If the solution to Y2K were as simple as rolling back the clocks, this web site and most others prolly wouldn't exist.

-- Anonymous, March 23, 1999

Anonymous99, You are right on the money, rolling the clocks back will work for embedded systems - your logic AND observations are sound (there are some very rare exceptions where this could not be done), and a number of power plants have done this with their control systems. However the trick would be to identifying all of devices with clocks, theres hardly ever just one clock. This is just a band aid, however, and eventually these systems should be make to work with the correct date. Another factor is rolling the date back itself - some systems will choke on this, so it should be done in consultation with the vendors, performed offline, etc. I don't like this method, but for some it may be the best option.

Regards, FactFinder

-- Anonymous, March 25, 1999

factfinder,

whatever happened to that positive (i assume) "emerging industry consensus" you were going to tell me about? just wondering...

-- Anonymous, March 26, 1999