From St. Peterburg, Russia for educational purposes. #534, Tuesday, January 18, 2000

TOP STORY

Disappointed by Y2K? Disaster Aplenty In Store

By Jen Tracy STAFF WRITER

Y2K may have proved disappointing, but an entire new year of imminent disasters promises to make up for it - so the prognosis goes.

For Russia, the year 2000 could very well be one of deadly atomic explosions, radioactive fallout, nuclear waste catastrophes, floods and fires. And the prophet isn't Nostradamus this time around, but Russia's Emergency Situations Ministry.

The potential disasters awaiting Russia were laid out in great detail on Monday by Emergency Ministry specialists in the Russian daily newspaper Segodnya. By their confirmed expert accounts, there are few safe places to be found in Russia's 11 time zones.

Given the nature of the potential disasters - most being of a nuclear nature - there's relatively little citizens can do to protect themselves. At the very least, drinking the water here is inadvisable.

If the past is anything to go on, Russia's future crop of bad news will verge on the apocalyptic. A roundup of 1999's headlining disasters reads like a page out of Revelations: "Locusts Attack Siberian Crops"; "3 Electrocuted on Bus"; "Chernobyl Still Causing Health Woes"; "Nuclear Plant Ablaze"; "Radioactive Fish Fed to Orphans"; "Radioactive Cranberries Discovered in Market"; "Toxic Sludge Threatens St. Pete Water."

Topping off the Ministry's list of potential disasters this year are imminent nuclear catastrophes - all too familiar to survivors of Chernobyl - at any number of the country's atomic energy plants, nuclear waste dumps and nuclear recycling plants with facilities badly in need of serious repair. According to the Ministry, Russia's nuclear energy complexes are all located within 30 kilometers of 1,300 populated places; catastrophes at these plants would endanger the lives of 4 million people.

Of particular concern to the Ministry are nuclear waste containers buried in the Karsky Sea, which are sending a flow of radioactive water to the shores of Newfoundland, exceeding radiation safety levels by as much as 10 times.

Specialists are analyzing the safety conditions of all such plants and are confident that in the near future, all such facilities will be in stable working order - but for now, questions concerning the safety of these plants have been raised.

Explosions, fires and automobile accidents - as well as more natural disasters like floods, earthquakes and landslides - should keep the Ministry busy as well.

During the first 11 months of last year, 26,944 people died in automobile accidents. The Emergency Ministry says one way to cut down on such deaths in 2000 is to improve action time on the part of ambulance drivers and police. The time it takes for injured persons to receive treatment or help at the scene of an accident leads to many otherwise preventable deaths, said Mikhail Shakhramanyan, the man behind the Ministry's grim prophecy.

Ministry specialists also predict between 50 and 60 human catastrophes a month. The most troublesome months apparently will be February, April and December. Fires in residential buildings, careless throwing away of dangerous chemicals, exploding pipes and electrical fires in communal apartments and collapsing buildings are the most common of Russia's such disasters. Shakhramanyan and his colleagues say these are most likely to happen in Moscow, the Moscow Oblast, St. Petersburg, Irkutsk, Kamchatka, Kemerovo, Magadan, Perm, Sverdlovsk Oblast, Chitinsky Oblast, Yakutsky Krai and Krasnoyarsksky Krai.

Floods are predicted for between April and June for the Arkhangelsk and Vologodsky Oblasts, the Komi Republic and the Krasnoyarsky Krai, as well as the Nenetsky and Chukotsky regions.

As for acts of terrorism in 2000, the Ministry says the fate of the future is entirely in the hands of politics.

Despite its somewhat apocalyptic tone, the Monday article was apparently not intended to cause widespread panic. "Of course, it's not set in stone that Russia will experience all of these predicted disasters," Shakhramanyan said

http://www.sptimes.ru/current/y2k.htm

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), January 18, 2000

Answers

Martin -

Another early report of expected Y2k failures in Russia. For speed- reading, italics are mine......

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Russia's Y2K glitches may lie ahead: experts

GEOFFREY YORK

Moscow Bureau, Saturday, January 1, 2000

Moscow -- Russia entered the year 2000 today in its familiar role as a source of fear and apprehension.

For most of the past half-century, Moscow's targeted nuclear missiles caused jitters beyond its borders. As midnight last night approached, Russia's neighbours were consumed by a new anxiety: about a computer bug that could cause a nuclear-reactor disaster or accidental nuclear launch.

Those fears may have been groundless. There were no early reports of serious problems last night in Russia's frayed network of electricity lines, power stations, telephone lines and gas pipelines, which had been considered vulnerable to the so-called "millennium bug" as computer clocks turned over from 1999 to 2000.

In the Russian Far East and Siberia, the first Russian regions to see midnight last night, officials said all nuclear plants and other utilities were working normally.

"The energy systems have entered the New Year without any disruptions whatsoever," said Anatoly Chubais, head of Russia's national electricity monopoly.

While the Kremlin seemed confident, many people in neighbouring countries and in the West were watching nervously as midnight arrived in each of the 11 time zones in the world's biggest country.

In Finland, pharmacies and drug companies reported a boom in sales of iodine tablets, which combat some of the effects of nuclear radiation. Many Finns were worried about the possibility of an accident at nuclear plants in northwestern Russia, near the Finnish border. Sales of the iodine tablets in recent days were 20 times normal.

In the United States, a special Russian-American military co- ordination group has been established at a U.S. Air Force base in Colorado to help avoid any potentially disastrous misunderstandings. Telephone hot lines from Moscow to Colorado were set up to ensure that a computer breakdown would not accidentally start a missile launch.

In Turkey, officials were worried that a Russian computer failure could disrupt supplies of Russian gas. A Russian pipeline is the main source of gas for many Turkish cities and industries, and Turkish officials were not satisfied with Russian assurances that the pipeline would function normally.

In Russia, however, the entire Y2K issue has often been dismissed as a Western plot to allow spies to penetrate Russia's technological defences in the guise of fixing them.

"The plan was to bring spy bugs to Russia and fix them into computers at state offices, allowing them to control the outgoing information," the Moscow newspaper Sevodnya wrote yesterday, quoting a former head of the Russian Communications Ministry.

Canadians living in Russia were not overly worried by the Y2K issue. Although the Canadian embassy installed a backup power generator and two satellite telephones in case of disaster, some Canadian diplomats were so nonchalant they were bringing family members to visit them in Moscow this week. But while Russia seemed to be experiencing no major computer failures last night, experts warned that it was too early to breathe easy. The greatest danger lies in the days and weeks ahead, when there could be a chain reaction of smaller failures leading to a bigger breakdown.

"It could happen in one week, two weeks or a month from now," said Nadezhda Sena, co-ordinator of a Y2K public awareness and preparedness campaign in Russia financed by the World Bank.

The biggest potential problems are in the Russian chemical industry and in public utilities, where there is a "medium" risk of serious consequences, Ms. Sena said. The Russians have done "almost nothing" in several key areas, including contingency planning and fixing the embedded microsystems in industrial technology, she said.

"They began very late. There is no money. Political and public officials were busy with elections and other things, so it wasn't their top priority. Very few people here really understand the issue. And if there are multiple failures, there isn't enough rescue capability."

Ron Lewin, a Canadian information-technology consultant who is working in Russia on Y2K problems, predicted that the failures could reach a peak next week.

"I'm expecting it will be a buildup of failures that could peak around Jan. 4 or 5 as people go back to offices and systems are powered up after being shut down for several days," Mr. Lewin said. "Statistically, something will go wrong somewhere."

Many Russian corporations, including the electricity and energy monopolies, seem to have worked seriously to prepare themselves for the Y2K issue, but it is difficult to be sure, he said. "The only real sources of information are the organizations themselves."

Source: Toronto Globe and Mail, Canada

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-- Lee Maloney (leemaloney@hotmail.com), March 18, 2000.