U.S. Tries Averting Y2K Panic

Updated 7:42 PM ET December 13, 1999

By TED BRIDIS, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - For people fearful that computers will crash on New Year's Day, ATMs will run out of cash and traffic lights will flash red, the White House has a message: These problems already happen every day somewhere in the United States.

Moving to avert panic at the first sign of any outage related to the Year 2000 problem, the Clinton administration sought to reassure Americans by reminding them Monday that technology is not infallible even without the complication of the Y2K bug.

Households spend 13 hours a year on average without electricity because of power failures, said John Koskinen, President Clinton's top Y2K expert. That does not include failures caused by bad weather, which when they happen average outages of 72 hours.

One to 2 percent of the nation's 227,000 ATMs are inoperative each day because of mechanical breakdowns or cash shortages, the White House said. And as many as 15 percent of the nation's 180,000 gasoline stations typically remain closed on New Year's Day because of lack of demand. And about 1 percent of traffic signals fail and begin to flash red every day.

The administration worries that a disruption in power or other essential service will immediately be blamed on Y2K, even though the failures may coincide with the date rollover but otherwise are related in no way to the computer glitch.

"Our strategy has been to provide the public as much information as possible," Koskinen said. "We think the public and the media will benefit from having a context" to compare an average day's failures with those that might occur during the weekend date change.

He warned that it may take hours or even days to determine whether a failure is connected to Y2K.

The White House also is worried about the American public's reaction to anticipated failures overseas in countries generally recognized not to be as prepared as the United States. Most of the world's time zones will move into 2000 hours before North America.

"We are much better prepared than developing countries around the world," Koskinen said. "We should not assume that what happens there will happen here."

The United Nations issued a study Monday that cited a "medium to high risk" that Y2K errors could harm public health and safety, particularly in developing countries. The United Nations' own coordination center predicted many Y2K mistakes, but it said businesses and governments will experience only limited damage in the early days of January.

It called the threat to human life small but "not zero." Inconveniences could range from minor to loss of jobs because of business collapses, it said.

Koskinen spoke a day before the Office of Management and Budget was to release its final report on the U.S. government's readiness. Koskinen said the OMB report shows only about 15 of its more than 6,000 most important computer systems remain inadequately repaired and tested.

The OMB earlier estimated the government's cost to confront the Y2K problem at $8.34 billion.

Koskinen talked Monday from the government's new $50 million crisis center just blocks from the White House. He said tests of the center's own computer networks last week turned up some problems not related to Y2K, but those problems were fixed.

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How many way can a story be spun??

Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), December 13, 1999

Answers

TOTAL B.S. !

-- Dan G (thepcguru@hotmail.com), December 13, 1999.

This was in the Vero Beach paper today and on television. So if the grid goes down on 1/1 and you're without power, remember, this is normal...

-- Mara (MaraWayne@aol.com), December 13, 1999.

Link Please

-- the Virginian (1@1.com), December 13, 1999.

Link

Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), December 13, 1999.

So... We will not know for sure if it was y2k or a terrorist or just plain dumb luck... Why doesn't that surprise me.

-- (...@.......), December 13, 1999.

"Koskinen said the OMB report shows only about 15 of its more than 6,000 most important computer systems remain inadequately repaired and tested."

Isn't 6000 closer to the number of mission critical systems the .gov first talked about? Didn't that number drop to somewhere around 3500 mission critical systems?

Interesting that he says 6000 MOST IMPORTANT COMPUTER SYSTEMS.

Not that this means a whole lot but the change is interesting.

Sorry Flint, reading between the lines has just become habit. Something just plain smells rotten.

-- the Virginian (1@1.com), December 13, 1999.

The number of mission critical systems keeps going down abut the stock market keeps going up. And why the heck is my Real Player Icon blinking in my system tray? Well I clicked on it and it looks like a major uprgrade - version 7.0. Well, see you later I'm gonna download it.

-- Butt Nugget (catsbutt@umailme.com), December 13, 1999.

Virginian:

I doubt the change in terminology means that much. I never did like the terms "critical" and "noncritical" because those terms implied a binary division, whereas the reality is a range of importance, from most to least. Kind of like drawing some arbitrary dividing line between hot and cold, with nothing between them, and with all hot things equally hot and all cold things equally cold. It just doesn't work that way.

However, OMB's definition of "adequate" must be pretty loose. Maybe this means "probably won't crash too often for government work, unless it does." If OMB is trying to say that all but 15 of the most important systems will work well enough to maintain the orderly operation of the agencies, then I flat don't believe it. If they mean that the nation can probably get by despite a lot of government floundering, then OK, I can accept this, but the transition period will still be miserable.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), December 13, 1999.