The story is that at least some prisons in Norway may release prisoners circa New Year's Eve because:

**Power companies serving Norway's Vestfold County cannot guarantee electricity supplies on New Year's Day due to the potential computer glitch, the NRK radio network reported Thursday.

The story (from AP in Oslo) is at:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/1999/06/17/international1020EDT0612.DTL

-- Anonymous, June 22, 1999

Answers

Thanks, Drew, for posting this. It's one of those short articles that makes you wish it had been longer, with greater coverage of the situation. When I first read "cannot guarantee electricity supplies" my initial thought was, "Nothing new there; no utility 'guarantees' power anyway."

After reading the full story, though, it becomes quite apparent that more is meant than just the standard no-guarantees we are used to here in the U.S.

"At the minimum security, open prisons the inmates will probably be released, while those in high security facilities would have to be moved to other parts of the country, " said Terje Weber, deputy director of the district's prisons."

The mention that high security prisoners would have to be moved to other parts of the country, indicates that it's only those "Power companies serving Norway's Vestfold County " which have indicated they may be affected by Y2K outages. This is the first mention I have seen which indicates any utility has expressed enough concern to authorities about their viability at rollover to engender some serious contingency plans for their service area. Hence this little article is of much more import than its size implies.

It would be very interesting to know how the residential and business customers in the Vestfold County area have responded to this news release, wouldn't it? Vestfold is located in the southeastern part of the country, near, but not on, the border between Sweden and Norway. The county has an airport, a college, and a population of about 209,000 people as of 1997.

-- Anonymous, June 23, 1999