I work at a fertilizer plant. Currently we are revamping a portion of it. For twenty years I have been in and out of chemical plants, pulp and paper mills, oil refineries...and I can say this to you dear readers...

The companies, due to competition and in order to lower cost, have installed automated systems on their valves and processes, and run their plants through central computers, that "watch" what is going on.

My gut feeling is this.....of the thousands of plants out there...the only ones that can spend the money necessary to get ready for Y2K are the big ones...the EXXON's and the Chevron's. The mom and pop plants, which are in the majority....chemical, etc.....can't spend the capital, and frankly, couldn't have found the expertise, to get their systems ready...

but the comforting thing about it is this....

Most of the operators and plant personnell "know" how their systems work....and the valves have a FC mode...which means, " fail closed" that is, the valves shut off automatically, if something goes wrong. I'm talking about critical ones....

The point is this....in all of my work and experience, I still feel a sense of concern when I consider how old so many of the plants are, and that if so many of the old and embedded chips fail, who can fix things? The only thing they will do is shut things down. Yet, I wonder how many upset conditions will cause chemical leaks...no way they can handle what may occur with any certainty...

I don't even want to address what the nuclear plants here and abroad will be doing. If they are smart...they will be shut down...and if there are problems...what will this do to the power grid?

the next few weeks and months will be ones that will tax all of us....I fear too, of the human spirit....once so noble, but now...so debased......look around.....the young ones are restless, and will they pull together when things get bad>? no, they will not...they will go haywire...

kinda rambled a little...sorry...

-- rickoshade (rickstershade@aol.com), December 11, 1999

Answers

rickoshade,

My undergraduate degree is in Chemical Engineering, and my first real job was in Process Control with Xerox digital computers in industrial applications.

As you said, the mom and pops know how the equipment works, and to the extent that manual ops are possible, they are the ones to do it. By the same token, in lesser developed regions, the impact will be less...NOT because they are any less computerized, but it was considered socially unacceptable to fire the people who had been made redundant by the automation. For instance, it doesn't matter that a water company in, say India hasn't finished fixing its systems, the people who actually ran the plant prior to Computers are probably still either on the Payroll, or recently retired with benefits. They will have no trouble running the plant.

Here in the States, we fired those people. We will now pay the price of treating these workers badly.

-- K. Stevens (kstevens@ It's ALL going away in January.com), December 11, 1999.

so true...in my own field..piping design...there is no sense of company loyalty.. No one out there feels safe,job wise. So I appreciate that reply. I regretfully agree...

-- rickoshade (rickstershade@aol.com), December 11, 1999.

Thank you for posting your first-hand experience, rickoshade.

Will mankind now rise or fall to the challenges?

Answer begins in less than 20 days.

-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), December 11, 1999.

Need some help here. If the mom and pops happen to produce a chemical"product" that is used by another manufacturer up the line, won't just the slow downs caused by failed shuts effect the economy over time, maybe making end products more rare and/or expensive?

-- DG (steverromano@aol.com), December 11, 1999.