Dear SysOp,

Someone has posted a lot of gibberish in the thread Martial Law?, demonstrating both their lack of programming skills (which probably indicates the meme to which they subscribe) and their lack of debate skills.

Regards,
Andy Ray

-- Andy Ray (andyman633@hotmail.com), August 24, 1999

Answers

My, my, my, Andy Ray.....just what did you do, to become so "popular"?

-- Bokonon (bok0non@my-Deja.com), August 24, 1999.

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001Hxo

-- (AreYouLonely@tonight?.com), August 24, 1999.

What's a meme? Where do you present your debate skills? Why does one need programming skills? Do you subscribe to the programming/debating type memes? Do you really want to hear a yourdonfor opinion?

-- R. Wright (blaklodg@hotmail.com), August 24, 1999.

A little or massive dose of narcissism Andy Ray? Oh not Andy Ray, he is way too accomplished to be lesser than a demi-god. Manipulative? Yes Andy Ray. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure you out.

-- Feller (feller@wanna.help), August 24, 1999.

Oh No!

Mindless drivel from members of the Senate, an elected body representing the public of the United States. Oh Dear!!! DOOMERS!!!!!

This must mean that Andy Ray doesn't believe in the democratic principles of the good old US of A.

I am sure that is why you asked about the Martial Law bit eh? You must be afraid of the elected members eh? Robert Bennett seems like a nice guy

But of course this is not what you were referring to **VBG**

Miss me yet?

-- Brian (imager@home.com), August 24, 1999.

Andy Ray

Is this the mindless drivel you are mentioning???

Does this pose a threat to you?? Is that fear I see in your typing??

Senate Y2K Committee
 
 

BENNETT, DODD CALL FOR CHEMICAL INDUSTRY Y2K READINESS SUMMIT

Lack of Knowledge Raises Safety Concerns

WASHINGTON, DC ? U.S. Senators Robert F. Bennett (R-Utah), Chairman of the Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 (Y2K) Technology Problem, and Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), Vice-Chair, noting a "lack of knowledge regarding the Y2K progress being made in preparing companies and others that manufacture, store, transport, or use toxic or hazardous materials in large quantities," today urged the White House to convene a special chemical safety summit to assess and improve the Y2K readiness of the chemical industry.

"The Y2K bug has the potential to disrupt the operation, transport, maintenance, and control activities at chemical facilities," the Senators said. "We rely on these systems to ensure our citizens enjoy a safe and healthy environment. A White House summit will help us better understand what the industry is doing to keep those safeguards in place."

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) endorsed the call for a summit. "With the millennial countdown approaching T minus 140 days, American communities must be better assured regarding chemical safety," said Gerald V. Poje, Ph.D., who oversees Y2K issues for the CSB. "A Chemical Safety Summit will help redouble efforts to prevent releases of hazardous materials from year 2000 technology problems."

A March 1999 report on the chemical industrys Y2K readiness, released jointly by the Senate Y2K Committee and the CSB, identified "significant gaps" in federal guidelines regarding Y2K chemical safety and a lack of information from small and medium-sized chemical enterprises. The industry was also the subject of a committee hearing in May, in which Senator Bennett called Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) action toward ensuring employee safety during the millennium date change "woefully inadequate."

What information does exist on the chemical industrys Y2K preparedness is based in part on a survey the Chemical Manufacturers Association (CMA) conducted of its membership beginning last December. To date, CMA has received only a 63 percent response. Data on another 7 percent of CMAs members was obtained through other means. Thirty percent of the countrys largest chemical companies have still not declared their Y2K status.

The Senators also expressed concern that a Y2K survey conducted by a coalition of associations representing smaller chemical firms this spring was overly optimistic. Almost 6,000 companies were contacted. The results, however, "were based on self-reported data from only 300 companies (a five percent response rate) that were in turn projected to the remaining 5,700 companies that did not participate."

In a letter to John Koskinen, Chairman of the Presidents Council on Y2K Conversion, Bennett and Dodd cited California as a possible model for nationwide action with regard to chemical Y2K safety. California recently instituted a program to survey and assist the 110,000 hazardous materials facilities located in the state. At present, no similar effort has been pursued at a national level, leading to the need for more accurate preparedness information.

"The Federal Government has an important role in providing Y2K leadership, coordination, and direction," the Senators wrote Koskinen. "The outcome of a federal summit should lead to a coordinated federal plan of action and communication on chemical safety and Y2K." The Senators support wide disclosure and dissemination of the summits findings at the earliest possible date.

The chemical industry is potentially vulnerable to the Y2K problem on two fronts. First, there is there a great deal of automation in the production, storage, and movement of chemical products. These automated systems may fail in unpredictable and potentially dangerous ways when the year 2000 arrives. Secondly, chemical production and storage facilities are often very dependent on external utilities, especially electricity, water, and telecommunications, for safe operations. There are concerns that failures may occur in one or more of these services in localized areas in the US and in parts of the world where US firms have chemical plants.

A July safety bulletin from the U.S. Department of Transportation provides an example of the vulnerability of the chemical sector to technological problems. Stemming from an investigation into a recent pipeline safety incident involving the transport of hazardous materials, the bulletin warned pipeline operators of potential problems with their computer systems, known as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, which electronically monitor and control pipeline operations. The bulletin said that in one particular situation, the systems had become temporarily "overburdened" as a result of database errors, a lack of reserve computational power in the SCADA processor, and the unusually dynamic changes that occurred during the incident. Operators nationwide were warned to review their own SCADA systems to safeguard against similar problems.

Also
 

Year 2000 Issues
 Technology Problems
 and Industrial Chemical Safety

 Year 2000 Issues
 

The chemical process industry relies on software and microchips
for the operation, maintenance, and control activities that are vital
to the safe operation of the plants as well as the profitable
manufacture and distribution of chemical products. Software or
microchips that store dates as two digits could render incorrect
results. For example, a control device may have been programmed
to provide a reading or report every six months using the two-digit
arithmetic. Such a device could interpret the year 2000 as 00
and calculate a negative number when measuring time intervals.
The outcome of such an event could pose a problem. The question
is: would the computer ignore the incorrect answer, or could it
cause the hardware to malfunction, or cause a major process upset?
Other such date-programming or date-embedded problems can be
categorized as follows:

* Dates stored as two-digits may assume the year 1900 instead of
the year 2000;

* 00 may not be allowed as a valid date;

* Dates may be required to begin with 19;

* Dates may have assumed a range that ends in 1999;

* Reports may assume and print a 19 as the first two digits of the
year;

United States Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board Page 24

* Dates such as 9/9/99 may cause hardware and software
problems;

* Leap year may be incorrectly calculated for the Year 2000,
resulting in problems around February 29, 2000 and December
31, 2000 on the 366 th day of the year.

Potential for Catastrophic Events Stemming from Year 2000 Non- Compliance

The potential for catastrophic events stemming from Year 2000
Non-Compliance can be divided into three categories. First,
failures in software or embedded microchips within the process
plants may cause process excursions or control problems resulting
in accidents. Second, external Y2K-related problems, such as
power outages may cause various problems, such as accelerated
shutdown of processing, monitoring, and safety systems.
Accelerated shutdowns may cause other problems such as the
triggering of fire suppression systems, causing loss of water
pressure for actual fires, and disabling such systems. Third,
multiple Y2K-related incidents may exceed the capacity of
emergency response organizations to respond.

Other factors that must be considered are applications that are
purchased from a supplier and customer applications that are
developed by the users. In addition, the current utilization of
integrated operations using multiple applications all of which pass
on information/data, or use information/data makes it mandatory
that users consider this in their readiness and operational
contingency plans.

Failures in Software or Embedded Microchips

The chemical process industries, irrespective of size and type of
operations, use a variety of software and embedded microchips to
operate, maintain, and control their processes. Y2K-related
failures, can at the minimum, cause off-specification products or
shutdown of the process and at the extreme cause process
malfunctions leading to accidents. For example, the agitator on a
batch reactor may fail to operate causing the initiation of a
runaway reaction. The emergency shutdown system (ESD) is
expected to stop the runaway reaction but the ESD itself may have
an embedded chip that may be susceptible to Y2K-related failure.
Many other examples exist for both batch processes as well as
continuous processes used by the chemical process industries.15
Chemical processes are usually built with multiple layers of
safeguards that require the congruent failure of various systems to
precipitate an accident. However, many accidents in the U.S. and
overseas have occurred when multiple simultaneous failures
resulted in catastrophic accidents. In addition, some automated
safeguard systems are on-demand or in reserve, making
recognition of the potential for failure very difficult. Thus, it is
prudent to explore the catastrophic potential of single Y2K-related
failures as well as combinations of various failures.

Power Outages

No effort was made in this study to assess the potential of power
outages from Y2K-related failures. However, potential Y2K-related
power outages represent another set of problems for
chemical and petroleum facilities. While many chemical and
petroleum manufacturing facilities have backup power generators,
Y2K failures may include concurrent loss of power, cooling water
and other system malfunctions. First, plants without auxiliary
power backup systems face a threat to parts of their processes that
may not shutdown in a fail-safe mode. Batch chemical processes
are especially susceptible because the safety of the process is quite
often dependent on time-dependent factors such as precisely timed
mixing, heating or cooling requirements. Second, a potential
scenario is that widespread power outages may cause shutdowns of
many plants, which in turn will require simultaneous startups.
Although startups of chemical plants are infrequent and their
durations are short compared with the life cycle of a plant, process
safety incidents occur five times as often during startup as they do
during normal operations 16 . Thus, a large number of simultaneous
startups may increase the potential of incidents in one or more
process plants. In addition, the simultaneous restarts of large
power-consuming facilities will impose large demands on the
electrical grid.

-- Brian (imager@home.com), August 24, 1999.

What's the matter Andy Ray? Don't recognize a Java alert when you see one? And what makes you think I'm a doomer?

-- (your@new.best friend), August 24, 1999.

Andy Ray, I'm glad that you are concerned about memes, too. I've had a letter in to Dear Abby for some time now, hoping she will tell me whether wet memes are normal. Have you ever had a wet meme, Andy Ray?

-- King of Spain (madrid@aol.com), August 24, 1999.