The U.S. government Rural Utilities Services (RUS) has a very interesting Y2k website that covers Y2k issues for smaller electric, water, and gas utilities in rural areas. One of the more interesting articles on the site deals with contingency planning:

What do we do on January 1, 2000, if failures begin to occur because of the year 2000 bug?

Actually we have already had telephone system failures similar to what might occur on January 1, 2000. One of the most interesting of these is the telephone outage that occurred in New York on September 17, 1991. Three New York airports were also shut down for four hours. This all started with a city wide brown out. Because of the low voltage, the switching equipment was automatically taken off the city current and a signal was sent to start AT&T's back up generators. A hookup failure kept the backups off line. The system was then running only on standby batteries and alarms were sent. The two technicians responsible for emergencies didn’t respond because they were both at a meeting discussing what to do when there is an emergency. The alarms didn't help because they had been disabled when construction in the area kept setting them off. After six hours the batteries went dead and so did all the phones. It was estimated that 5 million phone calls were stopped and almost 1200 flights were delayed or cancelled.

What was the cause of this failure? A comedy of errors brought about by overconfidence and inadequate testing and security procedures. The contingency plan was not followed. Even a system with triple redundancy isn't secure if one or more of the checks are removed from the system. This type of thing could happen after 2000 if part of a program or system fails and a warning is issued and ignored. How do we fix this type of problem? Follow the contingency plan. We must never assume that we can bend the plan for a few hours, or that an alarm is crying "Wolf!" again, even though it has been for the last week.

There's much good information on the RUS Y2k website, including an ongoing survey of rural utilities.

-- Anonymous, April 05, 1999

Answers

Thanks for the site, Rick.

Perhaps RUS is recommending caution because of the survey data shown on their site which has a response from 47% of rural utilities. Excluding billing and business process areas, I was surprised to learn of the relatively low Y2K compliance in the remaining survey areas by END OF YEAR 1999:

Electronic Infrastructure Systems ......... 74% Electronic Processes - Interconnection .... 66% Other Electronic Processes ................ 56%

The NRECA jumped all over the Feb 24 Senate Report which stated that: "small rural utilities were at greater risk than the larger ones and that they were further behind in their assessment and remediation efforts."

The NRECA response was "Electric cooperatives from all over the country have called in expressing amazement or disbelief at news reports calling into question electric reliability in rural areas, "said Ron Greenhalgh, chief engineer for NRECA in a PRNewswire release dated Feb. 26. Greenhalgh added that the "nation's co-ops are right on schedule with remediation of the Y2K problem."

I'm scoring this one in favor of the Senate report rather than the "happy face" reports of the NRECA.

-- Anonymous, April 06, 1999