Power companies claim pre-Y2K success

Thursday, 9 September 1999 23:11 (GMT)

(UPI Spotlight)

WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 (UPI) - Electric companies across the United States were claiming a successful passage of a major pre-Y2K test (Thursday) as the ninth day of the ninth month of 1999 apparently passed with no interruptions on the power grid. A shutdown of the nation's power supply when the century changes is one of the major fears caused by the Y2K bug.

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Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), September 09, 1999

Answers

Is this "deliberate misleading" or lying?

-- Lane Core Jr. (elcore@sgi.net), September 09, 1999.

Lane, I believe that this is more of the sloppy Y2K reporting that Gordon gave an example of recently at EUY2K. NERC has issued a press release at: ftp://biz.nerc.com/pub/9-9-99-y2k_press_release.pdf The first paragraph:

"As the clocks across North America rolled past midnight into Thursday September 9, the electric power industry was at full alert in a dress rehearsal for the rollover to January 1, 2000. The 9/9/99 date provided an excellent opportunity for the industry to practice for the transition to the year 2000 (Y2k) at the end of this year. 9/9/99 has been described as a possible Y2k problem date due to computer systems reading the four nines 9999 as the end of a data file. Exhaustive testing by the electric industry has shown that the September 9 date would not affect electric systems, but it was a perfect time for training and practice, under realistic conditions.

I am glad to see that NERC made it clear that the industry did not expect problems with this date. What I am not glad to see since it hurts public confidence is that this release appears to have been prepared in advance. While I can understand that no problems were expected, having it "ready to go" may be acceptable for PR people, but I don't like it. See this comment deep in the body of the release:

"A copy of this press release will be available from the NERC web site Thursday morning, September 9,1999. This site also includes other information on the electric industrys Y2k coordination program and results."

It "will be" and was...;)

Regards,

-- FactFinder (FactFinder@bzn.com), September 09, 1999.

Well, I did a check of the 9/9/99 NERC press release Acrobat file in an editor and found the following:

/Producer (Acrobat Distiller 4.0 for Windows) /Creator (Microsoft Word 8.0) /ModDate (D:19990909103227-04'00') /Author (Tim Gallagher) /Title (NERC Announces Kick-off of \215Pilot\216 Compliance Program) /CreationDate (D:19990909103140)

So at least this does show that this pdf file was made today, 9/9/99. I am not an expert at interpreting this type of file data, but surely the numbers following the date aren't the time, if they are, they are way off. Overall, at least it appears the final version as posted was created today...

Regards,

-- FactFinder (FactFinder@bzn.com), September 09, 1999.