Hi Folks, We had a comparatively good 60 minutes lead story on y2k here in Australia on Sunday. Not a really happy face one either!

Featured Ed Yourdon at his NM home and Ed Yardeni quoting 70%. Also featured Maurice Newman (our Y2k Czar, (Crocodile Koskinen??)) and a few others This link (well, not really a link, you'll have to cut & paste) will take you to a transcript of the story and a Chat forum which followed

Lots of good quotes, my elderly mother-in-law (fairly GI) was quite alarmed. eg:

ED YOURDON: "Some of the calculations that are taking place now are comparing this to the overall cost of World War II, ah, and it appears that we may end up spending more. Certainly, it's now being acknowledged as one of the most complex problems in modern history, and usually solving complex problems is an expensive proposition."

RonD

-- Ron Davis (rdavis@ozemail.com.au), March 15, 1999

Answers

The Australia "60 minutes" interview took place at my house on Aug 11, 1998 and finally appeared on TV some 7 months later.

I don't know whether I actually said that all 4-5 of the utility plants "shut down" after a rollover test was attempted; if indeed I did say that, I should not have. I do know of one utility that did shut down, and I know of another three or four that suffered problems -- but I don't know whether those other ones actually shut down.

As you know in the Y2K field, an enormous amount can happen within a single week, let alone 7 months. The incidents I was referring to took place in the spring of 1998, and one would imagine (or at least hope) that they've been fixed by now. In any case, one should turn to things like the recent NERC report, or information from Rick Cowles, or other such sources, for more up-to-date info on the status of utility plants.

As for the identity of the 4-5 plants I was referring to: no, I won't name them. Chances are that the utility companies would deny the allegation; after all, we live in the land where the determination of truth depends on what the meaning of 'is' is. And chances are that even if the allegations were true in the spring of 1998, the problems have been fixed.

Ed

-- Ed Yourdon (ed@yourdon.com), March 16, 1999.

Forgot the link!!!

Here it is...

http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/news/22970.asp

Sorry! RonD

-- Ron Davis (rdavis@ozemail.com.au), March 15, 1999.

URL, please Ron.

Mr. K.

-- Mr. Kennedy (looking@missing.info), March 15, 1999.

Thanks for the headsup, Ron. I particularly like the last exchange of the interview:

REPORTER: Is there a danger that by being so alarmist now, you could help bring on a recession? Dr ED YARDENI: I do struggle with this issue: whether Im contributing or I might contribute to making the situation more grim than it has to be. But if the policy-makers cant 100 percent assure us that there will be very few disruptions and the food supply will not be affected and the energy supply will not be affected, if they cant do that, then I think policy-makers owe it to us to tell us that maybe we should make provision to a certain extent for ourselves.

Amen. Mr. K

-- mr. Kennedy (mrk@home.com), March 16, 1999.

ED YOURDON: Well, the average person may find that the lights go out; thatll be the first noticeable thing. There may be brownouts or blackouts, which may last for a couple of hours, days or weeks, but the danger for Australia, the US and Europe is that if one or two plants go down they can pull down the rest of the grid with them. And whats going to pull them down is little microchips. The same kind of technology that you see in your VCR or microwave oven  there are literally tens of thousands of these in your typical modern power plant, and weve had four or five simulation tests in the US where they tried rolling the clock forward to see what happened, and in all of them the entire plant shut down.

Does anyone know what specific power plants Ed was talking about? Or do you think they misquoted him?

-- -- (_@_._), March 16, 1999.