Low-Tech Could Be Y2K Advantage for Italy

Updated 8:16 AM ET November 19, 1999

By Claudia Parsons

MILAN (Reuters) - Experts say Italy may be more at risk from the millennium bug than other leading industrialized nation, but the head of Italy's Y2K task force says it has one surprising advantage -- a low level of technology.

"Every country imagines that their problems are also those of other countries," said Ernesto Bettinelli, chairman of Italy's Year 2000 Committee.

He said water supply, one the major areas of risk in many countries due to the possibility that electronic control systems could fail, was less likely to be a major problem in Italy.

"In Italy water is not driven by electronic systems. You can count the number of electronic control systems for water on the fingers of two hands," Bettinelli said.

"The systems may be old and inefficient but they're not electronically controlled," he said in an interview.

Distribution of food and other vital supplies was also less high-tech in Italy than in countries where hypermarkets using fancy control systems dominate the retail market.

"The problem of food supply is very different in the United States and Italy because in the States they don't have the same network of small local shops," Bettinelli said.

Y2K is shorthand for the millennium computer bug problem. Experts worry that an old method of recording dates on software and chips controlling electronic systems could cause mayhem in computers when clocks strike midnight at the end of this year.

The theory is that dates recorded in two digits, like 89 or 97, will trip over the two zeros in 2000 and cause computers to crash and electronic appliances to seize up.

Major Italian utilities and telecoms companies have provided guarantees of millennium compliancy to the Year 2000 Committee but Bettinelli said the greater risk lay with the hundreds of smaller companies operating at a local level.

Italy has more than 1,000 small utilities providing services ranging from gas and water to refuse collection, and many of them could be affected by failure in the embedded chips in their own appliances or those of their suppliers.

"The biggest risk all over the world is that the control systems for energy producers don't work. If there is no energy this puts all the other services at risk," Bettinelli said.

"And the risk in Italy is that there are lots of small local situations over which we don't have control."

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Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), November 19, 1999

Answers

A reminder: I think this is the guy who declared, "The system will implode. We are going to be crucified" (or something very close to that) at the beginning of the year. The Italians are as ready as the Americans if you use the readiness of their spin machines as a metric.

-- Dave (aaa@aaa.com), November 19, 1999.

If that's the case than Italy is bioscotti.

Squirrel Hunter >"<

-- SH (squirrl@huntr.com), November 19, 1999.