If the electricity system can be manually run, or workarounds are possible, or it can be back up in a matter of hours, as the current mainstream media suggests, can anyone tell me what the problems were with last year's power outage in New Zealand that went on for several weeks?

-- Nina (lanina1963@yahoo.com), October 26, 1999

Answers

They had to physically replace cables which had burned out. The rationale behind the 2-3 day fix on failure for Y2k is that it's just a simple matter of programming. So it can't take long. This ignores the fact that remediation for some organizations has taken years, and that when it comes to an embedded system, you might have to do physical replacement. With a new version which has not been created yet....

However, hopefully there are no failing embedded systems or other software that are critical components to power, water, chemical plants, telecommunications, banking, shipping or pharmaceuticals production.... Then we would just have to worry about general government and business system failures.

-- You Know... (notme@nothere.junk), October 26, 1999.

Hope springs eternal...

MFU

-- Man From Uncle 1999 (mfu1999@hotmail.com), October 26, 1999.

The Auckland Power Crisis of 1998:

http://www.churchlink.com.au/churchlink/y2k/auckland.htm

-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), October 26, 1999.

NEW ZEALAND DID NOT HAVE A POWER OUTAGE LAST SUMMER, but one district in one city (Auckland) experienced power shortages when the underground cables that supplied it failed. Two of the cables were very old, and well past their design life, and two other cables had not been installed, maintained or operated according to the manufacturer's instructions.

The media hype that resulted made it appear that the whole country was without power, when really the failure only affected a very small number of people. One of the real lessons that we need to learn from all this does relate to Y2K. When some part of a major city does lose power on 01/01/00 due to a legitimate failure, how accurately will it be reported?

Malcolm

-- Malcolm Taylor (taylorm@es.co.nz), October 28, 1999.