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F E A T U R E|Issue 6.08 - August 1998
The Y2K Solution: Run for Your Life!!
By Kevin Poulsen
Scott Olmsted is dressed to do some serious debugging: comfortable khaki
shorts, a T-shirt from a Visual Basic conference, and a visor from one of
his Silicon Valley employers. But we're a long way from the land of
cubicles and industrial parks. In fact, we're a long way from just about
everything.
Scott is debugging with a hammer, trying to remove a stubborn two-by-four
from the wall of a mobile home plunked down in the high desert of Southern
California. After banging away for a few minutes, he finally yanks the stud
off the wall in a flurry of sawdust and splintered wood. It's a small
victory, but it brings him one step closer to his own solution to the
greatest computer glitch in history - the Year 2000 Bug. With more than 20
years of computer programming experience under his belt, Scott has decided
that the only real fix for the Y2K problem may be to pack up and move to
this patch of land 75 miles from his San Diego home. "In the next year or
so," he predicts, "the most common cocktail party chatter will be, 'What
are you doing to prepare for Y2K?' But by then, it will be too late."
This is sagebrush country, the kind of place where you can hear your
footsteps crunching in the gravel. But even here, 30 miles from the nearest
interstate, a line of telephone poles runs along the dirt road and PacBell
terminal boxes sprout from the ground alongside the cacti. While carpet
installers work in the next room, Scott is planning for the day when it may
all be useless. The property came with a freshwater well, and he'll soon
have a solar panel for power. For protection against looters, he's about to
purchase his first gun. "I've seen how fragile so many software systems are
- how one bug can bring them down," he worries. The idea of hundreds,
thousands, millions of bugs cascading all at once keeps him awake at night.
His Y2K retreat is easy to spot. In an area where high security means a
few strands of barbed wire clinging to a rusty pole, Scott's chain-link
fence is shiny and new. The alarm-company sign that hangs from the fence
would be more at home in Brentwood, and on the roof there's a DirecTV
satellite dish pointed toward the sky. The shed outside his back door will
hold nonperishable food. But with a programmer's methodical logic, Scott
didn't rush out to buy a year's worth of dehydrated grub. First he sampled
the fare from several distributors. One company sold a textured vegetable
protein that was a bit more expensive, but it came in a variety of flavors:
chicken, beef, and taco. "It was pretty good," Scott says, in the halting
measured tones of someone who doesn't want come across as a wacko. "We were
pleasantly surprised." So he splurged. What the hell, doomsday comes along
only once in a lifetime.
Throughout history, prophets and visionaries have spent their lives
preparing for the end of the world. But this time veteran software
programmers are blazing the millennial trail. The geeks have read the
future, not in the Book of Revelation, but in a few million lines of
computer code.
By now, the source of their anxiety is well known. In the 1950s and 1960s,
when the computer world was young and memory was expensive, programmers
developed a convention for marking the passage of time. It's the same
system most people use to date their checks: two digits for the day, two
for the month, and two for the year. Dropping the "19" from the year was
convenient, and it saved two bytes of precious RAM every time it was used.
Those were days of innocence and optimism. Everyone knew what would happen
if this little shortcut was still in use in AD 2000 - the two-digit year
would roll over like the odometer on an old Chevy, and the computers would
think they'd jumped 100 years into the past. Programmers knew it, and they
warned their managers. Not to worry, was the usual reply. When the
millennium finally rolls around, all this code will be ancient history.
But the code stuck around. The old software worked fine in the
postmainframe world, so nobody felt compelled to replace it. Instead, like
Roman architects, they just built on top of it. The two-digit year became a
standard, wired right into the heart of Cobol - the Common Business
Oriented Language that still serves as the digital workhorse of commerce
and industry. It also crept into the embedded microchips found in
everything from VCRs to nuclear power plants. For years the Y2K bug sat
quietly, remembered largely as an amusing textbook example of poor software
design.
But as 2000 drew near, the screwup became less amusing. In November 1996,
the comp.software.year-2000 newsgroup was launched, creating a forum that
would soon become ground zero for the Y2K survivalist movement. But at
first, the charter was clear: Discussions would be limited to Y2K bug
fixes, remediation strategies, and reports.
Over the course of the next year, information poured into the newsgroup,
and most of it was bad: The FAA was hopelessly behind schedule in patching
air-traffic-control systems; Edward Yardeni, chief economist for Deutsche
Morgan Grenfell Bank, laid odds that Y2K upheaval would trigger a
recession; Ed Yourdon, a respected software guru and author of 25 computer
books, predicted the collapse of the US government - not long after he
packed up and moved to New Mexico.
Optimism became a scarce commodity. Philosophical questions were raised:
Do programmers have a moral duty to remain at their keyboards until the
last moments of 1999, like captains on a sinking ship? Debates raged over
social Darwinism and the ownership of wheat in grain elevators. The
conversation moved on to the viability of dry dog food as emergency
rations. Plans were made to begin converting equities into gold and buying
land in remote parts of California, Arizona, and Oklahoma. January 1998 saw
250 cross-posts to misc.survivalism - up from an average of 30 a month in
late 1997. Gradually, a new acronym entered the Internet lexicon:
TEOTWAWKI, pronounced "tee-OH-tawa-kee." The End of the World as We Know
It. The
Internet's very own survival movement was born.
Scott Olmsted has known about the Y2K bug since the 1980s, but he never
gave it much thought until early 1997, when he received a snail-mail flyer
from Gary North, a historian and early leader in the Y2K preparedness
movement. After reading it, Scott remembers feeling a vague sense of dread.
But as a rational guy and student of decision analysis - the science of
logical decision making in the face of chronic uncertainty - he didn't jump
to any conclusions. Instead, he went online to do some research. As he
pored over Web sites and news clippings, Scott felt himself moving through
the same psychological stages endured by people confronted with fatal
illness: denial, fading into anger, leading to a deep depression that
culminates in a sense of acceptance. "I'm still not 100 percent sure that
the world's coming to an end," he admits. "But the idea that I may want to
get out of town for a while is not such a long shot. It's enough to make me
want to prepare."
With the exception of his wife, most of the non-geeks closest to Scott
think he's a little nuts. His half-brother, Clark Freeman, thought he was
going overboard. But since then, Clark has come around a bit - he, too, is
planning to stockpile some food in case things get rough.
If his brother is taking Y2K so seriously, he figures there might well be
something to it. "Scott has always been the level-headed one," Clark
remembers. "The classic straightlaced nerd."
"I've spoken with friends and relatives about this, and I've gotten
nowhere," Scott sighs. Worse, some of the more intense Y2K survivalists
also think he's crazy - or at least a bit naïve. After all, Scott plans to
celebrate New Year's Eve at his home in the suburbs; the place in the
desert will be there just in case things get rough. Then there's his fence
- it has no perimeter alarms, and he isn't even trying to camouflage his
location. But worst of all, his hideaway is only a half tank of gas away
from Los Angeles - close enough to the big city that he could wake up one
postapocalyptic morning to find hordes of Los Angelinos parked outside his
desert redoubt.
The hardcores believe it will happen like this: On January 1 (or shortly
thereafter), the electricity grid will go dead. Groceries in America's
refrigerators will go bad. Food distribution systems will crash and store
shelves will go bare within days. Businesses will fail, either because they
aren't Y2K compliant or because they are dependent on noncompliant
customers and suppliers. As losses mount and companies go under, the stock
market will plummet. Banks will calculate interest for negative 100 years.
The government will stop issuing entitlement checks to gray-haired senior
citizens when their age suddenly clicks back to -35. Panic will set in.
Police dispatch systems will be crippled, and the only law will be the law
of the jungle. Desperate citizens will abandon the cities to hunt for
resources in rural areas. They'll come looking for the mad prophets - the
Y2K survivalists - ready to plunder their food, their heat, and their
communications links. They'll zero in on Scott and his conspicuous retreat
like a pack of wolves on the scent of a kill.
But they'd better stay away from Steve Watson's place.
Steve Watson, a 45-year-old systems analyst, is still kicking himself for
not preparing sooner. He didn't get going until early this year, and he
worries that he still has a lot of adjusting to do. As he puts it, "I
didn't even know how to tan a hide until a couple of months ago."
If all goes according to plan, Steve will ring in the new year at a secure
compound somewhere in southern Oklahoma. While the Pollyannas of the world
watch Times Square on the tube, he'll be listening to the radio for early
news of Y2K disaster. When the power goes black - perhaps at the stroke of
midnight - he'll be ready with a small arsenal of guns. A generator will
power his bunker indefinitely, but no light will escape to the outside -
none of Steve's neighbors will even know that there is a survivalist in
their midst.
Eight months ago, if you'd told Steve that Y2K survivalism would become
his obsession, he would have laughed in your face. Last year, he was a
happy-go-lucky Y2K project analysis manager for DMR Consulting, a
Canada-based computer consulting firm, just finishing up a big remediation
project for a major American phone company. The effort was grueling - 10
writers, programmers, and analysts cleaning up 10 million of lines of Cobol
code. But in the end it all worked out, and the phone company's billing
system was declared ready for 2000.
In that heady moment of self-congratulation, Bill Finch, one of Steve's
coworkers, approached him with a thought. "Steve," he said, "don't you
realize that everything stops if the power grid goes down?"
Anxiety set in. The telephone company had poured substantial resources
into its Y2K effort. Even then, Steve's project had been an odyssey plagued
with countless unexpected glitches and snags. If the power utilities - with
their Byzantine grid of thousands of generators and substations around the
continent - weren't already well along in their efforts, then all the
systems he'd dragged into Y2K compliance would be dead as doornails when
the lights went out.
That afternoon, Steve hit the Net, where he learned that the situation is
far worse than he had imagined. The power grid relies on a sophisticated
feedback mechanism: Remote terminal units report their power needs up the
communications chain that controls the output of electricity generators.
The entire network is riddled with embedded chips. Nuclear plants supply
nearly 20 percent of the power in the grid, and none of them have been
certified as Y2K compliant. Charles Siebenthal, head of the Year 2000
embedded systems project at the Electric Power Research Institute, says the
industry is just beginning to look for potential Y2K failure points.
Anecdotes from industry consultants suggest that if the year 2000 came
today, every utility in the country would crash. "No electric plant or
facility of any kind has been Y2K tested without some kind of impact," says
David Hall, a senior consultant with the Cara Corporation. "There isn't
enough time to fix everything. There will be some disruption. How long? How
deep? We just don't know."
Then there are ripple effects to consider. "There's not a single railroad
switch in the country that's manual anymore," Steve says. "They're all
computer controlled, and railroads deliver coal and fuel to power plants."
Exit Steve Watson, bright-eyed optimist; enter the new Steve Watson, Y2K
survivalist, rugged pioneer, and Renaissance man in training. Steve began
spending six hours a day on the Internet, studying alternative power,
construction techniques, and emergency medical procedures. Anything he
couldn't find online, he ordered from local bookstores or Amazon.com. He'd
never kept a gun in the house, but soon he had three: a 30-30 for deer
hunting, a .22 for small game, and a 9-mm handgun for personal protection.
Of course, the 9-mm is practically a popgun against looting mobs, so four
M-16 assault rifles are also on the way.
Finally, he pooled his money with Bill Finch, his DMR coworker, to buy 500
remote acres in Oklahoma. (Bill holds the public deed to the property, so
his name has been changed in this article to keep the location secret.) In
choosing the hideaway site and its size, Steve overengineered to account
for family and friends - few of whom subscribe to his Y2K scenario. "Most
people think I'm nuts. Even my kids think, Dad's going off the deep end."
Steve's wife, Teresa, has been more supportive. She's no computer expert,
but her Baptist faith tells her that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
could ride in with a global computer crash. Meanwhile, Steve is making
plans for everyone else: close friends, family members, sisters-in-law,
brothers-in-law - and their children, mothers, and fathers. Forty people in
all. In 2000, they'll work together to till the soil and patrol the fence
line.
Steve's doomsday vision is the same as that of most Y2K radicals, but
radicals can pop up in some pretty mainstream places - like the US Central
Intelligence Agency, which is advising its agents abroad to keep cash on
hand and stockpile extra blankets in preparation for New Year's Day 2000.
The agency worries that bugs in the power networks and communications
backbones of developing nations could cause outages that would jeopardize
the safety and well-being of its agents.
Millions of Americans have already gotten a small taste of critical system
failure. When the onboard control system of the Galaxy IV communications
satellite failed on Tuesday, May 19, 1998, the outage temporarily crippled
US pager networks, several broadcast news operations, and even credit card
verifications systems. Most of the disruptions were brief - technicians
were able to switch to backup communications paths - but doctors who use
pagers as a lifeline with patients and colleagues were forced to set up
camp in hospitals and offices. The failure of one satellite threw a wrench
into the mechanisms of modern life, perhaps providing a peek at what life
may be like at the dawn of the new millennium.
Or sooner. While the full brunt of the Y2K bug is reserved for AD 2000,
some early problems are already developing. In 1996, Visa and MasterCard
temporarily stopped issuing credit cards with an expiration date of 2000
after credit card verification terminals began choking on the "00." The
gaffe led to customer complaints and a lawsuit filed by a suburban Detroit
grocery store against its computer supplier, TEC America Inc. Since then,
most verification systems have been upgraded, but Y2K is making its
presence known in other areas. The Information Technology Association of
America released a survey last March showing 44 percent of the US companies
they polled have already experienced Y2K failures. Ninety-four percent of
the respondents termed Y2K a "crisis."
The GartnerGroup estimates that 180 billion lines of code need to be
examined and that 20 to 30 percent of all firms worldwide have not yet
started preparing for Y2K. Many of these are expected to suffer significant
failures. In a series of studies issued over the last year, Gartner
surveyed 15,000 companies in 87 countries to assess their Y2K readiness.
The results weren't encouraging. Small companies rated lowest - for most,
winning over new customers has taken priority over the Y2K problem. But
midsize and large companies are lagging, too. Gartner then rated the
overall Y2K efforts of industrialized nations on a scale of zero to five,
where five is total compliance on all systems. The highest scorers on the
scale, including the US, Canada, and Australia, rated somewhere between two
and three - a score that suggests they have completed an inventory of Y2K
vulnerabilities, but not yet developed a comprehensive remediation plan.
The US may be at the front of the pack in the Y2K race, but that's small
comfort to some legislators. Last March, the House Subcommittee on
Government Management, Information, and Technology warned that 37 percent
of the critical systems used by federal agencies will not be ready in time.
Then in June, California Republican Stephen Horn, who heads the
subcommittee, issued a scathing report card on the Clinton administration's
Y2K progress. He gave the government an F.
John Koskinen, head of the president's Year 2000 Conversion Council,
complains that Horn is just a tough grader. "As a government, we're in a C+
to B range," he argues. Koskinen keeps a digital desktop clock that runs
backward - on the day we spoke, the clock showed 609 days, 8 hours, 39
minutes, 16 seconds, and counting - but he generally refrains from calling
the situation a crisis. Instead, he describes it as a "critical management
challenge."
He fully expects the federal government's critical systems to be ready on
time, or even early. "Many companies, financial institutions, and federal
agencies are still working on the problem," he says. "But most major
organizations plan to have their solutions in place by the first quarter of
next year."
If the council is successful, Koskinen believes, Americans will confront
little more than a few minor inconveniences when the year 2000 finally
rolls around. "There's not enough information right now to indicate that
stocking up on Coleman stoves and Sterno is an appropriate response," he
says. And in the end, he predicts, "a lot of people won't notice."
Koskinen has earned the respect of some Y2Kers by emphasizing the need for
high-level planning in the event that some systems fail. But Y2K
survivalists feel more comfortable with their own personal contingency
plans, and a commercial infrastructure is already forming to support them.
Walton Feed, an Idaho food distributor that sells products over the Net, is
doing a brisk business in long-term supplies; the company attributes this
to Y2K. And in Sully County, South Dakota, developer Russ Voorhees has
attracted national publicity and hundreds of potential clients for his
"Heritage Farms 2000" project - a Y2K survival community that's been on
hold since June, when a local planning commission refused to grant the
necessary building permits. For those who want to go it alone, there's a
sense of adventurous fun in their preparations - the pride of
self-sufficiency and an excuse to get away from the keyboard to earn some
merit badges. But Y2K preparedness is not just a Boy Scout fetish, and it
isn't always about getting away from it all.
"If everybody moves to rural areas, they'll just take their problems with
them," explains Paloma O'Riley, a red-haired, forty-something mother, wife,
and computer expert. Paloma lives in the small town of Louisville,
Colorado, just east of Boulder, and when she looks around her community she
doesn't see potential looters - she sees neighbors. Her suburban hamlet has
become a major landmark on the Y2K map as the world headquarters of The
Cassandra Project, a grassroots Y2K preparedness organization that can
perhaps best be described as a kind of Millennial Neighborhood Watch.
Until last year, Paloma was a Y2K project manager at the Rover Group, a
UK-based auto manufacturer, where her first responsibility was to identify
all of the company's vulnerable systems and target them for patching. But
her search didn't end with a couple of corporate mainframes. Inadvertently,
Paloma opened up the Pandora's Box of Y2K: embedded systems.
Embedded systems draw the Y2K bug-fixing task out of cyberspace and into
the real world. There are lots of pea-brained microchips out there, nestled
in everything from microwave ovens and automobiles, to power plants and oil
refineries. Most don't care what the date is, but a small percentage of
them do, and that made Paloma nervous. "I became concerned about just how
prevalent embedded systems are," she recalls. "Several members of my family
have medical problems, so when I started investigating I became very
concerned about medical devices like defibrillators, physiological
monitoring equipment, and the entire medical services infrastructure."
When her contract came up for renewal in 1997, Rover asked Paloma to stay
on in London to 2000. She declined - the thought of family and friends
surrounded by noncompliant systems that might leave them cold, hungry, and
without medical services was too much to ignore. Back in the States she
began networking with other people who shared her concerns, and that's when
she realized "we needed to put together an organization to address the
issues and get information out to the public."
Thus The Cassandra Project was born. In Greek mythology, Cassandra was a
mortal woman courted by the god Apollo. To win her affections, Apollo gave
her the gift of prophecy. Still, Cassandra rejected him, so the frustrated
deity decreed that no one would ever believe her predictions. Paloma
O'Riley gave a nod to Cassandra's fate when she chose the name for her Y2K
preparedness group, but she is precisely the kind of mortal woman you'd
want at your next PTA meeting - a firm believer in the notion that some
good, old-fashioned community-building may keep the Y2K nightmare at bay.
The Cassandra Project has helped spawn a dozen Y2K community preparedness
groups around the country. It has a board of directors that includes
several computer professionals and a Web site at millennia-bcs.com that
lists a menu of articles discussing possible Y2K scenarios, ranging from
minor annoyances to outright Y2Kaos. The site attracts more than 100,000
visitors a month.
Between speaking engagements, Paloma spends her days organizing biweekly
meetings with neighbors to discuss contingency plans, and lobbying the
state government. "We've been working with the Cassandra group on a lot of
their initiatives," says Steve McNally, staff director of the Colorado
Information Management Commission. "They've talked to several legislators
and the governor's office and brought some awareness of the issues to the
table."
For her part, Paloma and her family plan to stockpile a six-month supply
of food. Her worst-case scenarios look much the same as those of the most
hardcore, self-sufficient Y2K survivalists, but the bomb-shelter aspect is
conspicuously missing. Paloma believes that people will pull together in
times of turmoil. If calamity strikes and she is forced to draw the line,
she's determined to do so in her own backyard.
Even if Paloma's neighborly pragmatism sets her apart from the militia
types and fundamentalist Christians who regularly contact The Cassandra
Project, her efforts have brought her in contact with a thriving
premillennial subculture. "People in other millennial movements, including
Christian fundamentalism, point to Y2K as a sign of the times," says Philip
Lamy, a professor of sociology and anthropology at Castleton College in
Vermont. Lamy specializes in the study of secular millennialism, and he
sees Y2K survivalism as a prime example of the genre. "Generally,
millennial movements appear when a society or culture is going through a
period of rapid cultural, economic, or technological change," he says. "The
explosion of the Internet and the World Wide Web is fueling a lot of this
now."
Still, there are a few things that set the Y2Kers apart from the crowd.
For one, the Y2K bug is not simply a matter of myth, superstition, or
prophesy - it is a tangible problem hardwired into the fabric of our
industrial society. In addition, the people who are taking Y2K most
seriously are not laypeople or neophytes - they are specialized technicians
who approach the situation with a sophisticated understanding of society's
hidden machinery. But if heightened technical awareness alone could explain
the apocalyptic conclusions drawn by the Y2K survivalists, then every
well-informed computer geek would be moving to the desert - and that
clearly isn't happening. With so many intertwined variables to consider,
logic inevitably takes a back seat to subjective intuition - a personal
sense of security that extends from the microcosm of a single computer
program to the macrocosm of modern society. Ultimately it all comes down to
faith.
But this, too, sets the Y2K survivalists apart. True millennialism is
rooted in faith - fundamentalist Christians may anticipate an apocalypse,
but they optimistically expect it to be followed by 1,000 years of
celestial rule. Y2K survivalism, on the other hand, doesn't concern itself
with redemption. It is antimillennial - the polar opposite of
techno-millennial movements like the Extropians who see technology as the
stairway to a higher plane. (See "Meet the Extropians," Wired 2.10, page
102.)
"All this suggests that you don't have to be a religious fanatic, a
Christian fundamentalist, or a ufologist to believe that our world may be
in trouble - that there's something serious afoot in our nation and our
world," Lamy adds. "The Y2K problem is overlapping with other survivalist
movements, and like them it shares a kind of a fatalistic vision of the
future."
Three weeks have passed since Scott Olmsted put the carpet installers to
work in his retreat. The carpet is in now, and he's turned his attention to
other details, like night-vision equipment - his property is on high
ground, and with the right hardware he could scan most of the valley from
his backyard. He's also thinking of getting laser eye surgery so that he
won't be dependent on contact lenses after 2000. It never seems to end.
"Once you take the first steps to prepare, you basically admit that this is
big enough to do something about. And then you realize you should be doing
more."
Scott has turned his back on denial - the blind faith that allows people
to live normal lives in the face of staggering complexity, risk, and
uncertainty. Instead, he's chosen to acknowledge his own vulnerability. As
he describes it, "I've always known that the economy is complex and that we
live on the end of a long chain of ships, planes, and 18-wheelers." Scott
sees how the Y2K bug could disrupt that chain, and like other resolute
souls - environmental activists, antiabortion protesters, and corporate
whistle-blowers to name a few - he, too, has been driven to act by the
clarity and intensity of his vision. The rest of us may be content without
quite so much awareness, but embracing the Bug has actually made Scott feel
better. "I know one guy who started taking Prozac when his denial fell
away," he says. "Taking action - doing something - really gets you out of
that."
Scott admits there isn't enough evidence to prove he's right. But, he
insists, that's not the way to look at it. "There's not nearly enough
evidence pointing the other way to make me abandon my preparations," he
says. In a way, he's managed to optimize the Y2K problem - even if the new
millennium dawns without incident, his efforts will have yielded a supply
of inexpensive food, a new collection of practical skills, and a nice
vacation home in the country. It's an eminently logical win-win, and Scott
has taken comfort in that. "I'm not waiting until the ground is shaking to
prepare for the Y2K earthquake," he muses. "I'm going to be ready for an
8.5. I may look foolish if it turns out to be minor, but that's OK. That's
the nature of decisionmaking under uncertainty."
Kevin Poulsen is a columnist for ZDTV.com .
America Offline
( Inside the Great Blackout of '00 )
"Most of the nation's power systems must be compliant, or they all go
down, region by region, in one gigantic, rolling blackout," warns Gary
North, keeper of the oldest, most notorious Y2K doomsday site on the Web.
If the lights go out at the dawn of the 21st century, North believes the
failure will be permanent, because the computers that control the grid will
be unfixable if there isn't power to run them. Thereafter, he argues, the
blackout will trigger the collapse of civilization.
The North American grid is vulnerable to simultaneous failures. Generating
facilities in the US, Canada, and Mexico jointly move power through
high-tension lines that distribute electricity through four regional
interconnections. Within each region, if one facility goes offline, the
others compensate to pick up the slack. But there's not much spare capacity
built into the system; the North American Electric Reliability Council, a
group that is drawing up a timetable of Y2K fixes for the Department of
Energy, admits that if multiple generating facilities fail in one region,
this "may result in stressing the electric system to the point of a
cascading outage over a large area."
This is how it could happen: A power station is equipped with safety
systems that deactivate steam boilers if they aren't maintained frequently.
Suppose maintenance was last performed in 1999, which an embedded chip
recorded as "99." Now it's the year 2000, so the chip subtracts the old
year, 99, from the new year, 00, and finds, amazingly, that maintenance was
last performed -99 years ago. Clearly this is an error, so the chip shuts
down all the boilers, just to be safe.
Meanwhile, at another power station, a temperature sensor attached to a
transformer averages its readings over time. On January 1, 2000, the sensor
divides temperature by the year - which is expressed as "00" - and comes up
with an infinite value, triggering another shutdown signal. If small faults
like these knock out a half dozen facilities, the rest will go offline to
protect generators from burning out in a hopeless effort to meet the
growing demand.
The distribution grid also has weak points. "We have at least 800
different types of embedded controls on the wires," explains Gary Steeves,
director of a Y2K project at TransAlta Utilities, the largest
investor-owned power company in Canada. "Some of the protective devices log
dates of faults in activity and can automatically take a component out of
service." If the same controller has been installed in thousands of remote
locations, and the chips share the same Y2K bug, they'll all fail
simultaneously.
Most US power utilities refuse to comment on the likelihood of these
disasters, fearing litigation if they offer reassurances that turn out to
be wrong.
Tim Wilson, publisher of Y2k News, worries about the nearly 9,000 small
regional companies that pull power off the grid at the local level.
"They're clueless as to what to do about Y2K," says Wilson. "They know they
have embedded chips, but they don't know where they are. If there's a power
shortage, rural areas may not be allowed to take power off the grid,
because cities could have a higher priority."
This suggests an ironic scenario: Remote areas may remain dark for weeks
or months after January 1, 2000, leaving Y2K survivalists waiting in their
isolated cabins for the lights to come back on - while complacent urban
dwellers enjoy uninterrupted service.
- Charles Platt
Copyright © 1993-98 The Condé Nast Publications Inc. All rights reserved.
Compilation Copyright © 1994-98 Wired Digital Inc. All rights reserved.
-----------------------
NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is
distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior
interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and
educational purposes only. For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
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Robert A. Hettinga