http://www.y2k.org.za/press/news/articles/990902.htm

02 September 1999

Running Water

South Africa is a water-stressed country but the people responsible for bulk supplies of the precious resource are confident that they won't put further stress on the nation as it rolls over into the Year 2000.

South Africa's two main suppliers of potable water, Rand Water and Umgeni Water, have both affirmed that they are Y2K ready for the new millennium and that their consumers' taps won't run dry on their account.

Both say that should there be any water supply problems the disruptions would probably occur in the distribution chain either at local authority level, or because of power outages.

"We are satisfied that the systems at Rand Water are year 2000-ready," says Adam van Biljon, Rand Water's Manager: Systems, and Association of Water Boards' representative on the National Y2K Task Force Team.

"However, just as Eskom cannot guarantee uninterrupted electricity supply, we cannot guarantee that water will always reach the end user."

The National Year 2000 Task Force Team comprises Eskom, Transnet, Telkom, SACOB, the Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut, the SA Foundation, the Association of Water Authorities and the Department of Constitutional Development.

"We supply bulk purified water to local authority reservoirs in much the same way as Eskom supplies bulk electricity. It is the local authority's responsibility to distribute water and power to individual households," says Van Biljon.

Says Umgeni Water's Year 2000 project manager, Leon Scannell: "A contingency plan has been developed with a view to minimising the impact of potential year-2000 problems on Umgeni's core business, which is the treatment of wastewater and the purification, storage and transport of potable water to its customers.

"Umgeni is confident that, except in the case of prolonged, continuous electricity outages at Umgeni's treatment plants, there should be no disruption of water services to Umgeni's customers due to year-2000 related problems.

"Umgeni has contacted its major customers to ascertain the compliance status of each, and to deal with any possible areas of concern where contingency planning is concerned.

"The completion date for the compliance certification phase of Umgeni's year-2000 project was the end July 1999, after which the project went into compliance maintenance mode.

"This entails ensuring that all equipment, software, hardware, firmware and electronic interfaces are confirmed compliant, prior to implementing in the organisation."

As South Africa's largest water utility Rand Water supplies more than 10-million consumers in its 17 000 sq km distribution area. Umgeni Water is the major supplier of potable water to the 8,5-million people living in the KwaZulu-Natal region. Together, the two utilities supply water to nearly half of the country's population.

Van Biljon says the distribution of purified water does not rely on date-dependent computer systems, but on a manual system assisted by technology.

This means that the Millennium Bug problem expected to surface in unrectified computers and other date-sensitive systems during the rollover to the year 2000 should be minimal. The rollover is when such non-Y2K compliant equipment and devices will misinterpret the two zeros representing the year 2000 in their programming and react as though it is 1900.

As Rand Water is reliant on Eskom for electricity and on chemical suppliers for water treatment purposes it has asked for commitments from its critical suppliers that their Y2K projects will also meet the year 2000 compliancy deadline.

Rand Water itself has already identified, rectified and tested equipment and systems for Y2K compliance and has already drawn up its contingency plans.

Rand Water's Y2K readiness has, in part, been achieved through the use of a Year 2000 diagnostic and repair tool from Greenwich Mean Time which highlights problems on the hardware, software operating systems and applications, data and data exchange, and advises what steps need to be taken to make personal computers (PCs) Y2K ready.

The PCs at Rand Water are used largely for administrative purposes, running spreadsheet and word processing applications, and many are connected to the mainframe as intelligent terminals. Many also monitor the purification plant's PLCs (Programme Logic Controllers) which control the status of plant and plant parameters, including the rate of water flow.

Only 85 of Rand Water's 1 000 PCs did not meet year 2000 specifications and had to be replaced.

Billing, an area that can be highly sensitive to year 2000 issues, is a mainframe-based operation and the system has been Y2K-tested as part of Rand Water's overall Y2K project. Van Biljon says that when the systems were developed, four digit dates were used and will therefore not be affected by the Millennium Bug.

Umgeni Water launched its Y2K project in July 1997 under the management of Leon Scannell, with Brian Walford, CEO for Umgeni Water, as the Project Champion and the Umgeni Water Management Committee (MANCO) as the Project Steering Committee. The Umgeni project adopted the British Standards industry definition of compliance and all systems are being tested in accordance with this.

The project initially focused on dealing with the year-2000 readiness of all its IT infrastructure, such as hardware, operating systems, software and communications infrastructure. All Umgeni's mission critical systems have been tested and certified compliant and the 140 non-compliant PCs in the organisation have already been replaced with fully compliant systems, says Scannell.

In addition, the compliancy testing of the PLCs, Scada systems and radio telemetry systems in use at Umgeni has also been completed.

Some relevant statistics:

South Africa is considered a water-stressed country, with fewer than 1 700 kilolitres (1 kilolitre=1 000 litres) a year available for each consumer;

In Gauteng, South Africa's most densely populated province, an average household of five people uses between 800 and 1 000 litres of water every day;

Water for the economic heartland is pumped uphill from the Vaal River, 70km away, resulting in enormous energy costs for bulk supplier Rand Water;

Last year, Rand Water supplied Johannesburg with 2 807-million litres of water a day -- and this consumption is still growing.

-- Old Git (anon@spamproblems.com), September 02, 1999

Answers

"Van Biljon says the distribution of purified water does not rely on date-dependent computer systems, but on a manual system assisted by technology."

"Water for the economic heartland is pumped uphill from the Vaal River, 70km away..."

Am I seeing a contradiction? Or am I confusing distribution with acquisition? Is there a difference? Can you still distribute water if you can't pump it 70 kilometers uphill?

Sincerely, Stan Faryna

-- Stan Faryna (info@giglobal.com), September 02, 1999.