Has anyone seen any actual CONTINGENCY PLANS?greenspun.com : LUSENET : TimeBomb 2000 (Y2000) : One Thread |
I would like to know just what a CONTINGENCY PLAN is? Everyone says if we don't get it fixed in time don't worry we have CONTINGENCY PLANS... What does that mean? That there are plans to make it work some other way? Or just plans to get out of Dodge... I have never seen anyones plans, yet they say they have them. If you have any links on this please let me know.. Thanks
-- Stash (stashin@home.com), July 31, 1999
Seems to me the most important contingency plans would be water, warmth and food for the people but I haven't heard of plans for this as of this late date!
-- Michelle (??@??.com), July 31, 1999.
Ha, haa haa, haaa haaa haaa, ... ...This is a great question!
Not me, anybody else out there? Anybody seen "the book?" <:)=
-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), July 31, 1999.
Yes, I have seen the contingency plans for our group of power stations. In fact I helped draw them up.Sorry there is no link, because we are not going to pass potentially commercially sensitive information on to our competitors, but I can give a brief outline.
Additional staff will be on duty in case we do have any problems with the grid and have to black start. We have tested our manual control capability, and have proved that we can run satisfactorily on manual without any additional staff. (We did this for 19 days last month). We have installed and tested backup communications systems, and trained all staff in their use.
That is all the information that I will pass on in a public forum, I have gone into greater detail in previous discussions in the Electricty Utilities Y2K forum for those who are interested in the electricity sector.
Malcolm
-- Malcolm Taylor (taylorm@es.co.nz), July 31, 1999.
I asked the same question on this forum last week: "Help, our community needs contigency plans". I got about 25 responses, (thanks everyone), spent four nights running down the leads/links, and came up with the list below to give to our little group working on our county Board of Supervisors, (who, so far, have no contingency plans). We were looking for a late-in-the-game list that simply listed the highest priorities: #1 do this....#2 do this....#3 do this, and so on for our county/towns to follow. I didn't get exactly get that, but... But maybe the list will be a help to you or others. Hope so. Some wrote to say that "contingency plans" really means individual preparations, for if IT happens there is little that any gov. entity can do to help. Good luck. LuLouhttp://www.y2knapa.com/commchecklist.html
http://www.ci.eugene.or.us/Council/Agenda/EMORD.htm
http://www.coalition2000.org/prepplan.htm
http://www.zdnet.com/zdy2k/1998/09/4796.html
http://www.angelfire.com/mn/inforest/capersj989.html
http://y2ktimebomb.com/Computech/Management/clanza9845.htm
http://www.rv-y2k.org/prepcomm.htm (article on bottom)
http://www.y2kboulder.com/task_forces.htm
http://www.cassandraproject.org/watsew.htm
http://www.naco.org/programs/infotech/y2k/programs.cfm (not much on it, but the National Association of Counties, for answering questions)
http://www.coalition2000.org/Y2KUrban99.htm
http://www.fema.gov/pte/prepare.htm (Good old FEMA, Emergency Response Teams may be valuable?)
-- LuLou (luana@walkon.net), July 31, 1999.
I asked the same question on this forum last week: "Help, our community needs contigency plans". I got about 25 responses, (thanks everyone), spent four nights running down the leads/links, and came up with the list below to give to our little group working on our county Board of Supervisors, (who, so far, have no contingency plans). We were looking for a late-in-the-game list that simply listed the highest priorities: #1, do this....#2, do this....#3, do this, and so on for our county/towns to follow. I didn't get exactly get that, but... But maybe the list will be a help to you or others. Hope so. Some wrote to say that "contingency plans" really means individual preparations, for if IT happens there is little that any gov. entity can do to help. Good luck. LuLouhttp://www.y2knapa.com/commchecklist.html
http://www.ci.eugene.or.us/Council/Agenda/EMORD.htm
http://www.coalition2000.org/prepplan.htm
http://www.zdnet.com/zdy2k/1998/09/4796.html
http://www.angelfire.com/mn/inforest/capersj989.html
http://y2ktimebomb.com/Computech/Management/clanza9845.htm
http://www.rv-y2k.org/prepcomm.htm (article on bottom)
http://www.y2kboulder.com/task_forces.htm
http://www.cassandraproject.org/watsew.htm
http://www.naco.org/programs/infotech/y2k/programs.cfm (not much on it, but the National Association of Counties, for answering questions)
http://www.coalition2000.org/Y2KUrban99.htm
http://www.fema.gov/pte/prepare.htm (Good old FEMA, Emergency Response Teams may be valuable?)
-- LuLou (luana@walkon.net), July 31, 1999.
I have a 6 month supply of some good stuff. Just in case.
-- Doppy (Dopedup@usa.com), July 31, 1999.
Well, a prepper of my acquaintance works in the IT department of a local manufacturer. Maybe 250 employees?Anyway, she described her company's written contingency plan at our last meeting.
One page.
Useless.
Clueless.
Another trip to the store, anyone?
-- Jon Williamson (pssomerville@sprintmail.com), July 31, 1999.
Contingency Plan: You're on your own. Good Luck! Sorry we can't afford the gold watch or severance pay.Hope you took your vacation and sick days.
-- sue (deco100@aol.com), July 31, 1999.
Remember, at 100 days Yardeni will have a conference on workarounds. That will be of considerable interest.
-- Mara Wayne (MaraWayne@aol.com), July 31, 1999.
Our local electric utility will have extra linemen on standby. (Now then, don't you all wish _your_ utility had that kind of foresight?). Eat your heart out.
-- A. Hambley (a.hambley@usa.net), July 31, 1999.
My contingency plans are my personal preparations. The Feds' contingency plans are summed up by the various infamous executive orders for nuclear war/etc. aftermath. (Read Sorokin's mentions of historical government actions during famines accompanied by civil disorder in his 1942 book "Man and Society in Calamity" for a briefer but still accurate version). The vast majority of US companies and (almost as accurately) most local governments and foreign governments have their contingency planning consist wholly of believing pollyanna media/government reports of Y2K = BIR or less. Any questions?www.y2ksafeminnesota.com
-- MinnesotaSmith (y2ksafeminnesota@hotmail.com), July 31, 1999.
Washington D.C. has 88 contingency and emergency plans for Y2K:[Fair Use: For Educational/Research Purposes Only]
District Prepares for Y2K System Failures
By Eric Lipton
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 28, 1999; Page A1
The District government, recognizing that its year 2000 repair program likely will not be completed on time, is planning a massive New Year's Eve mobilization of emergency personnel and other staff to ensure that critical city services are not interrupted if computer systems fail.
Police will be stationed at more than 120 locations across the city, working 12-hour shifts, to take walk-in requests for emergency services. Twenty-one "warming centers," each supplied with food, water and cots, will open. School crossing guards will be on call, ready to replace traffic lights at major intersections. And D.C. General Hospital will have extra staff members as many as 175 on site.
These are just a few of the 88 contingency and emergency plans the District is feverishly working to put in place by the end of the year. Similar efforts are underway across the United States among governments and private companies, but in the District, officials have acknowledged the city is so far behind on its Y2K fix that it may have to rely on some of these "work-around" techniques.
"Because we began late, there may be things that suffer an interruption that we did not completely get to," said D.C. Chief Technology Officer Suzanne J. Peck. "Within our agencies ... in some function, a handful may fail temporarily."
Officials are confident that most of these plans even those that will be put into effect regardless of any system failure will not be needed, and that even in the District, Y2K will be one of the century's most hyped nonevents.
City officials want to convince the public that the new year will begin in the nation's capital without chaos no matter what happens with D.C. operations or outside services such as telephone, gas and electricity.
"Our intent is not to alarm people, but put people at ease that things are under control," Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) said yesterday. "We are going to have this city work for people."
Added Cmdr. David B. McDonald, the supervisor of police Y2K planning: "We want to reassure the residents and visitors to the District that even if Armageddon comes, we will assist and protect the public."
The D.C. Council will be briefed on the public safety contingency plans at an oversight hearing this morning.
The District's own assessment of its progress in making year 2000 fixes demonstrates the need for such planning: With six months left in the year, only 41 percent of the District's 336 major computer systems have been fixed. The rest are scheduled to be repaired and tested by the end of October.
Of the city's 73 agencies, 19 including key departments such as Health, Housing and Community Development; Tax and Revenue; Child and Family Services; and Public Works are not even halfway done with their year 2000 repairs and planning.
Williams said he is "not at all surprised" that so much work remains, given the city's late start on addressing the Y2K problem. But he added that he is reasonably comfortable with the status of the city's Y2K repair efforts and has the impression that the District is about even with other major cities, saying the city may be understating its "readiness."
Virginia and Maryland, by comparison, say their government systems are virtually Y2K-proof, and while they also have contingency plans, they are more confident that they won't have to use them.
[snip]
The District's late start is largely to blame for its lagging effort. While Maryland and Virginia began working on the problem several years ago, the District waited until last summer. Recognizing the danger of a catastrophic failure in the city, Congress gave the District $62 million in emergency funding this year to accelerate the work. But even with an army of more than 300 consultants at work most under a $76 million contract with IBM Corp. success is far from assured.
The struggle at D.C. General Hospital illustrates the challenge. D.C. General and its related health care divisions are about 48 percent "ready," according to ratings released Wednesday by the District's year 2000 program.
The hospital's mainframe computer system which handles medical records, patient accounts, budgeting, laboratory data, patient registration and other hospital operations will falter at year's end unless several million dollars in repairs are made.
The city is rushing to install a new computer system, but the first phase is not scheduled to be operating until mid-September. Officials are debating whether to repair the old computer in case the new one is not ready.
And that is only the beginning.
An estimated 80 percent of the 1,000 pagers assigned to staff at D.C. General and other divisions of the city's hospital and health care network are not Y2K compatible. At the start of June, the city had not issued a purchase order to buy replacements.
Each of the hospital's four ultrasound machines and 21 defibrillators used to reestablish a regular heartbeat-is not Y2K compliant, although replacements are on order. And the critical-care monitoring system in the intensive-care unit also must be replaced.
"You can't have an emergency room without a defibrillator. You can't have an intensive-care unit without monitors," said William D. Wild, senior vice president for compliance at D.C. General.
Given all this uncertainty and fewer than 190 days before the end of the year D.C. General administrators and staff members are spending hundreds of hours preparing backup plans.
The 250-bed hospital, which served 51,237 in its emergency room last year and 80,000 in its hospital clinics, is arranging to have 50 temporary workers available to hand-process records and other tasks if computers fail. As many as 124 employees including nurses, doctors and financial staff members may be asked to stay overnight on New Year's Eve, Wild said.
An extra 30 to 60 days' worth of pharmaceuticals is being ordered, and up to 90 days' worth of other basic supplies from bottled water to bandages is being purchased. The cost to the city just for the contingency planning, excluding the basic Y2K repairs, is about $4 million.
Even at agencies where year 2000 repairs are farther along, extensive contingency planning is underway. The broadest effort involves emergency services, where the plans are largely directed at anticipating failure of outside utilities such as electricity and telephone all extremely unlikely.
"The phone company says they are 98 percent certain it won't go down. The power companies say they are 99 percent certain everything will work," McDonald said. "But if that 2 percent and 1 percent cross, we need to be prepared."
Every officer in the city's 3,600-person police force will work 12- hour shifts during the New Year's weekend. Starting about 10:30 p.m. on New Year's Eve, the police department will deploy two-person teams to 120 locations across the District, including fire stations, convenience stores and fast-food restaurants.
Each officer will have a radio, and each of the 10 antenna sites for the radio system will have a backup generator. The city's 150 school crossing guards will learn how to handle traffic if lights go out. Staff is prepared to process crime reports and bookings by hand.
"We can't say, 'Sorry, Mr. Burglar, we can't book you today. Why don't you come back tomorrow?' " McDonald said.
At the Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department, leave time is being restricted for the 1,763-member staff between Dec. 15 and Jan. 15. Crews on the 16 ladder trucks are being given the tools and training to perform elevator rescues, supplementing the city's three regular rescue squads.
Backup to the city's computer-aided dispatch system is ready: thousands of 3-by-5 cards detailing which trucks to send depending on the address of a call. Fire trucks and ambulances already have been checked.
The city's Emergency Operations Center will be in gear before New Year's Eve, staffed by the public-safety-related agencies, including the Red Cross and the National Guard. All 21 warming centers, most at city schools, will be open New Year's Eve.
"If need be, people who go to these centers will be warm. They will have somewhere to sleep and something to eat," Emergency Management Program Officer Barbara Childs said.
The contingency planning extends far beyond the central emergency agencies.
The D.C. Water and Sewer Authority, for example, will spend more than $1 million to rent several locomotive-size generators to ensure that water will flow if the electricity goes out.
The Public Works Department will ensure that the city has 87,000 gallons of vehicle fuel available, double the normal supply. Extra truck parts, backup generators and other supplies also are on order. Plans have even been made for trash collection crews (they would work day and night), tree maintenance (complaints would be taken at the Reeves Municipal Center on 14th Street NW) and rat patrol (private exterminators would be used).
Officials are urging residents to prepare for the new year as well, stocking up on food, fuel, bottled water and other supplies as they would for a winter storm.
Jack L. Brock Jr., a U.S. General Accounting Office computer expert who described the city's Y2K outlook in February as "bleak," said last week that while he is reassured the city is making contingency plans, it must be able to implement them.
"They can't just be paper plans," said Brock, whose office is about to start another review of the District's Y2K status for Congress. "They have to do enough testing and validation to be confident that they will work."
Interim City Administrator Norman Dong said Williams is committed to ensuring that the plans work. To date, 38 of the 88 contingency plans are in draft or final form. From July until September, 23 mission- critical city agencies will hold mock drills.
"Our hope and expectation is that it will be business as usual," Dong said. "But we are taking nothing for granted. We want to make sure we are covered, that no matter what happens, we are prepared."
) 1999 The Washington Post Company
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-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), July 31, 1999.
I heard on the news (several channels) that they now have 'cooling centers' for those in the east with the heatwave since the power is so iffy. They have asked people not to use air conditioners or fans.Could this be the forerunner of the 'warming center' contingency plans?
-- Sammie (sammie0X@hotmail.com), July 31, 1999.
Also see this recent thread:http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0016ip
"Corporate Contingency Planning: 5 Large Companies, from significant business sectors."
-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), July 31, 1999.
[ Fair Use: For Educational/Research Purposes Only ]
The New Official Line on Y2K: Contingency Planning Is Now Seen as 'Readiness'The New Official Line on Y2K: Contingency Planning Is Now Seen as 'Readiness'
By David Franke, ) 1999 WorldNetDaily.com
CongressDaily published a summary this week of a briefing on local Y2K readiness by John Koskinen, chairman of the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion. The last paragraph of that article is, in reality, a concise statement of the new official line on Y2K. While there are no quote marks, I have no doubt that Koskinen's comments are portrayed accurately. CongressDaily has no ideological agenda.
Here it is:
"Koskinen estimated that close to 75 percent of counties across the nation will be prepared for Y2K problems through either compliance or contingency plans."
Think about that statement for a moment. It has immense implications for your safety and well being.
Those of us who are concerned about Y2K have been complaining for months about the lack of precise definitions about readiness, and the use of weasel words and weasel phrases to fill the vacuum. We started out with "Y2K-compliant." Even though there was no universally accepted definition of that term, it sounded tough and generally was applied to mean that serious tests had been met. The term made our spin-doctors a little uneasy, so it was replaced by a more pliant term: "Y2K-ready." Heck, the drunk on the street corner is Y2K-ready.
We can live with that, said the spin-doctors.
Unfortunately for those spin-doctors, some Americans still don't buy their rosy scenarios. So now we have the new term - "Y2K-prepared" -- and the new hidden assumption: "Having a contingency plan makes you prepared for Y2K."
Folks, contingency planning is not remediation, and it does not imply that we're in good shape.
Everyone - every individual, family, community, corporation, or other entity - should have a contingency plan. Even if you are "Y2K-compliant." After all, you may be innocently mistaken in your belief that you are Y2K-compliant, and you certainly can be battered by forces beyond your control even if you are internally compliant. So everyone needs a contingency plan.
But a contingency plan is not a substitute for remediation, and it should not be used to lull us into continued apathy. Yet that's how it's being used here.
We are told that "close to 75 percent of counties across the nation will be prepared for Y2K problems through either compliance or contingency plans." Sounds pretty good, doesn't it? We're getting there, right? But if you deconstruct that sentence you will see that it is meaningless.
It could mean that 5 percent of counties are compliant, and 70 percent have contingency plans. (That's why the two very different terms are lumped together, of course.)
Then there's the words "close to." How close to 75 percent?
And the words "will be prepared." When? December 31?
Oops - that means some 25 percent of the counties will have neither compliance nor a contingency plan. Nada. I hope I'm not living in one of those counties.
And then the term "contingency plans" is never defined, of course, any more than the other terms. Your contingency plan could be a 911 system that stands to be Y2K's first casualty.
Actually, the idea that only 5 percent of our counties may be compliant could be close to the truth. And that's scary. We - the president's henchmen, the corporate flacks, the PR firms that devise these wonderful evasions, the compliant press - we don't want you to be scared, and you don't want to be scared, so let's just say that "close to 75 percent of counties across the nation will be prepared for Y2K problems through either compliance or contingency plans."
Now, repeat that until you go back to sleep. It was just a bad dream.
But I keep having these bad dreams. Even when I'm awake. This week, for example, I'm attending the extraordinary week-long Y2K conference organized by two dedicated professors at George Washington University, Paula Gordon and Stuart Umpleby. I'm on a panel with (among others) former Ambassador Harlan Cleveland, the State Department's inspector general, and the World Bank's Y2K program director, Joyce Amenta - who hits me a variation of this new official line on Y2K.
Read my full account in today's lead story, "State Department official stands firm on Y2K dangers." Read that article carefully. Some of the quotes are quite amazing. But I didn't make them up. Honest.
Ms. Amenta says that the world has become prepared for Y2K in the past three months. She has to use that time frame because in January she told us the world was going to be Y2K toast.
How could three months make that much of a difference, I asked her, when U.S. corporations and agencies have been working on Y2K remediation for years, and still are not ready? What's their secret? (And, incidentally, if they're that good, why are they still "developing" nations?)
She answers that "It's all a matter of risk. It's true that some critical systems will not get fixed, but they have contingency plans and their risk assessment has gone down."
Think about that. It's not just useful-but-noncritical systems at risk, which will be a "nuisance" when they don't work. They have critical systems that won't get fixed.
Not to worry - they have contingency plans! No power, contaminated water, whatever, it doesn't matter because they have a plan. None of this is going to affect the world's economy because they have a plan. (And they'll probably get that plan into effect around the time they get the broken systems fixed.)
But there's more, folks! She excuses this "reassessment" of risk by noting that many U.S. agencies redefined their risk assessment by paring down the number of computer systems they labeled as "mission-critical." You have to give her credit for putting it up front: If the U.S. can lie, why can't these foreign nations lie? That'll make the natives feel better when their food supply disappears.
But there's still more, folks! In reply to another of my questions, she actually sees it as an advantage that probably less than 5 percent of the people in these developing nations have ever heard about Y2K, much less become prepared. "Maybe that's an advantage in that there could be less panic, less stockpiling."
Hey, the real problem is not that you're not going to have food - but that you might store away some food if you understood this! I couldn't believe what I heard. I still can't.
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-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), August 01, 1999.
A huge percentage of EMS, Fire & Rescue services are provided by vol. stations around the country; these are the local guys like my husband who just love this sort of thing so they drop whatever they are doing in their working world, and come to the aid of their neighbors. (Urban areas generally have paid people standing by on a full-time basis, but not so in many suburban and rural areas.) My husband doesn't want to hear about Y2K, which is a difficulty for me, so I keep waiting for his unit to get some word passed down as to Y2K contingency plans they need to put in place. My expectation is that word from FEMA, the State or even the county EMS/Fire directors would get him thinking, where I have been unable to. I'm still waiting for some sign that anything like that has happened. There is no change in his resistance to contingency planning for our family, so I have to assume that the ops people in his station are not discussing any for the community either... I would feel less anxious if this were not so.
-- Kristi (KsaintA@aol.com), August 01, 1999.