CANADA BATTLES THE BUG

Calgary buckles down for the bug

A gentleman (below) believes that alot of the problem with folk and Y2K is the fears of the Millennium itself. This is crap. The problem is that it could be -40 in Calgary during the rollover. Not where I would want to be. I know what it is like to wake up in -40, its bloody cold.

>The planning assumption now, he says, is that Calgary will see >several weeks of intermittent brown-outs and occasional localized >failures, not much different from what it has seen in the wake of the >privatization of the electrical system.

>The question of planning assumptions, though, is a bit of a tricky >point. Mr. Rindfliesch, of Calgary's disaster services, stopped cold >when asked what his planning assumptions were for Jan. 1. He said >he wasn't allowed to say because he could be held liable for any >comments he made. > >He would talk about projections, though, which are listed in the >province's Y2K Web site and which he said he could endorse. >Alberta, including Calgary, has a low risk of "widespread or >extended" power outages. Mr. Rindfliesch said he doesn't expect >significant interruptions of the utility infrastructure.

This is from the Globe and Mail agian. The URL for alot more good Canadian info; http://www.globetechnology.com/summary/Y2K.html

Brian

http://www.globetechnology.com/gam/Y2K/19990401/TYCITY.html

Calgary officials say the city is prepared for the year 2000 problem - but residents are still snapping up generators

Thursday, April 1, 1999 ALANNA MITCHELL Alberta Bureau

Calgary -- John Corbett has sold more generators in the early months of this year than he has in four years running.

And it's all because of the millennium bug.

The people lining up for his generators are terrified that, come midnight on Dec. 31, Calgary's computer-driven infrastructure will shut down and they'll be left in an apocalyptic -- not to mention chilly -- land.

Mr. Corbett, who owns a generator sales firm called The Power Factor, recently had a shipment of 35 going out to a single buyer as a guard against panic in the wee hours of Jan. 1.

His typical customer is a retired couple with lots of money, living in the house of their dreams. Their only niggling worry is Y2K. And, hey, why worry when you don't have to?

Calgary officials say the millennium bug poses little worry for the city: Major civic services such as policing and public transit will be prepared by June, and many smaller services are already bug-free. In fact, only Quebec and Vancouver are ahead of Calgary among large municipalities in squashing the bug.

But the job is pricey: Calgary city hall alone has spent $7.9-million, and that figure doesn't take into account the cost of regular staff who have devoted months to the project.

"I think Calgary is extremely well-prepared," said Harvey Rindfliesch, head of Calgary's disaster services, which co-ordinates the Y2K issue for the entire metropolis.

Calgarians still seem spooked by the bug. If they're not out buying generators, most are worrying about how best to deal with it.

Fifty-three per cent of Albertans say they will be personally affected, according to a February poll of 800 residents by Angus Reid Group. The most seriously worried are women (58 per cent), people in the highest income bracket (58 per cent), and -- here's the corker -- people in the prime computer-savvy age of 18 to 34 (57 per cent).

Nearly one in five Albertans is stocking up on food, according to the survey. About 14 per cent are investing in an alternate power source.

And 12 per cent are withdrawing cash from the bank, afraid the bug may eat up their money. The average amount they're planning to withdraw: $3,662.10.

Stephen Harper, head of the Calgary-based National Citizens' Coalition, has been giving this phenomenon a lot of thought, and believes the Y2K fear stems from the fact that an apocalyptic vision is embedded into the Judeo-Christian sensibility.

All that culturally encoded, time-triggered anxiety has shifted around and become focused on computers, which few people understand and even fewer know how to fix. It's both powerful and real.

"I think this is a deep, deep cultural thing," Mr. Harper says, adding he personally does not believe apocalypse looms.

It's this potential for panic that has the experts popping headache pills. In fact, the psychological response of the people who live in Calgary is one of the wildest of the wild cards in how the city will respond to this once-a-millennium problem.

"One of the things that worries us is that if people believe that there may be a crisis, it means there may be a crisis," says Roger Girard of the Calgary Regional Health Authority, who's in charge of making sure that the city's hospitals are bug-free on Jan. 1.

His team has spent $72-million so far and will need more. It has tested the region's 4,146 computer systems, its 234 buildings and their security systems, and every one of the hospitals' 6,123 medical devices, to see what they'll do come 12:01 a.m. on Jan. 1.

The medical devices category includes necessities such as ventilators and infusion pumps, the kinds of things you'd really like to know are still working if you hit the hospital at, say, 12:03 a.m. on the first day of next year.

The news on that front is much better than anyone had imagined, Mr. Girard reflects. Sure, there's that CAT scan at the children's hospital that can't be brought up to snuff, but it will be replaced -- for a cool $1-million -- before the end of the year.

The few other big-ticket items that also can't be made Y2K compliant will also be replaced, he says. Most of the delicate equipment tested fine, and the rest will be fixed by the time it's needed.

The big worry on the hospital equipment front now is something called "clean management." If some of the bug-free pieces break between now and then, the challenge will be to make sure they are fixed with equally bug-free bits.

The real problem for the health authority was the thousands of hospital computer systems, including admitting systems and payroll, that were in much worse shape than anyone had thought.

"They absolutely, unquestionably would have failed," Mr. Girard says. It's taken $50-million just to make them capable of working in 2000.

It was the same thing with all the thousands of computer chips embedded in systems that control hospital buildings. Now, though, all that has been identified and will be fixed, he says.

The months leading up to the end of the year will be devoted largely to contingency planning, including trying to figure out what to do if people in Calgary start stockpiling medical supplies.

It's a big worry, he says, especially since most modern manufacturers don't have the capacity to store huge amounts of goods.

Beyond that, it's a question of whether the city's electrical and telephone systems will continue to work. On Dec. 31, for example, Mr. Girard will be watching everything like a hawk, but not from his current office because it's not set up with a generator. Instead, he'll be at a command centre -- complete with generator -- set up by the city's disaster services system, waiting for midnight.

The planning assumption now, he says, is that Calgary will see several weeks of intermittent brown-outs and occasional localized failures, not much different from what it has seen in the wake of the privatization of the electrical system.

The question of planning assumptions, though, is a bit of a tricky point. Mr. Rindfliesch, of Calgary's disaster services, stopped cold when asked what his planning assumptions were for Jan. 1. He said he wasn't allowed to say because he could be held liable for any comments he made.

He would talk about projections, though, which are listed in the province's Y2K Web site and which he said he could endorse. Alberta, including Calgary, has a low risk of "widespread or extended" power outages. Mr. Rindfliesch said he doesn't expect significant interruptions of the utility infrastructure.

The police, fire and ambulance services will have back-up power in the New Year just in case. The telecommunications industry is not expected to suffer interruptions in service, but there are no guarantees, goes the official line.

In Calgary, the emergency operations centre (whereabouts secret) will be linked up (by ham radio, if need be) to the provincial emergency command centre and down to the fire and police dispatchers, emergency medical services, the transit dispatch, water treatment services and sewage treatment service.

Mr. Rindfliesch's biggest worry, however, is guessing how the volatile public will react, whether by stockpiling goods or overreacting to minor disruptions.

His best advice to people is to make sure they have a working battery-operated flashlight and radio. The rule of thumb: Prepare as anyone would for a bad snowstorm.

He, for one -- and he has spent months researching this stuff -- is not about to take his money out of the bank, or to cash in his mutual funds. And he's certainly not buying a personal generator.

That's no skin off the nose of Mr. Corbett of The Power Factor. He's not sure how he can keep up with generator demand as it is -- he's busy making sure his customers remain incognito. After all, he said, if the lights go out at midnight, who wants to be known as the only house on the block with power?

ALBERTA'S CONCERNS

Angus Reid conducted a poll in February asking Albertans what measures they would consider to combat year 2000 problems:

19 per cent plan to stock up on food;

14 per cent plan to look at alternate power sources;

12 per cent plan to remove cash from banks;

11 per cent plan to update software;

10 per cent plan to keep up-to-date financial and personal records;

3 per cent plan to buy new computers or appliances;

3 per cent plan to stock up on water;

3 per cent would keep cash on hand;

2 per cent plan to avoid travel;

2 per cent plan to become more knowledgeable;

8 per cent plan to take other measures;

45 per cent plan to do nothing.

-- Brian (imager@ampsc.com), April 01, 1999

Answers

Good work, Brian. Just one point. The Angus Reid survey results will be skewed if done by telephone because Calgary has a high level of computer technology with a large percentage of people connected to the internet; thus, many folk who might be y2k aware and preparing may have been unreachable by the surveyors.

I suspect the preparation rate is much higher than this survey found.

-- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), April 01, 1999.

Rachel -

What leads you to conclude that these numbers are off? They look fairly reasonable if one assumes that only 10-20% of the population are really doing anything about Y2K. Given the natural human propensity to avoid taking action until events force one's hand, the numbers look accurate. Depressing (if you believe that there will be some serious disruptions), but accurate.

Here's an interesting exercise. 1998 census shows population of Alberta at 2.9M. Apply the percentages from the survey above to 2.9M people. Imagine the impact of just those numbers hitting the supply chain in Canada. Assume that households average 4 people and thus would be 25% of that total. Call it 700,000 households, just for estimating purposes.

Let's say that the 14% in the survey who responded that they are looking at "alternate power sources" actually bought a genset. That would pull 98,000 generators through the system, and that's just for one province in Canada. There are probably 60 million households in the US, and if just 10% of those try to acquire generators, that's 6 million gensets. Could Honda and the others truly ramp up to meet even that minimal demand at this late date? Anyone seen 1998 (or even better, 1Q1999) generator sales figures for Honda?

No wonder Mr. Koskinen is worried...

-- Mac (sneak@lurk.com), April 01, 1999.

Thanks, Brian.

... The question of planning assumptions, though, is a bit of a tricky point. Mr. Rindfliesch, of Calgary's disaster services, stopped cold when asked what his planning assumptions were for Jan. 1. He said he wasn't allowed to say because he could be held liable for any comments he made. ... He would talk about projections, though, which are listed in the province's Y2K Web site and which he said he could endorse. ...

And they wonder WHY the public MIGHT panic, when their public officials wont even be honest?

Sheesh!

Its NOT people stockpiling that will cause panic ... in Canada or the U.S.

Its dishonesty of the officials that will.

And guess who well hold accountable!

Bet on it!

Got a lawyer, dot gov?

Diane

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), April 01, 1999.

Mac,

I know it's difficult to make accurate calculations re the number of generators. I do know that many of us began buying generators last year as we watched the effects of the ice storm on Montreal. How helpful they will be is another question; we can't count on them to run furnace fans for heat because our homes are heated with natural gas, and word on progress on dealing with embedded systems in that system is sparse.

I live in Calgary; pretty well everyone I know is preparing, many of them for a long time. Does that mean I think we'll all be ready and have no problems? No. But lots of folk here are just quietly going about what needs to be done without a lot of fanfare.

-- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), April 02, 1999.

Stephen Harper, head of the Calgary-based National Citizens' Coalition, has been giving this phenomenon a lot of thought, and believes the Y2K fear stems from the fact that an apocalyptic vision is embedded into the Judeo-Christian sensibility.

All that culturally encoded, time-triggered anxiety has shifted around and become focused on computers, which few people understand and even fewer know how to fix. It's both powerful and real.

"I think this is a deep, deep cultural thing," Mr. Harper says, adding he personally does not believe apocalypse looms.

________________________________

And personally folks this is what gets me. How dealing with power failure could possibly be connected to the apocalypse. This is a matter of personal accountability to the enviorment we live in....

-- Brian (imager@ampsc.com), April 02, 1999.