Reported on local news....

Multnomah County, Oregon has said it will have a new system in place in about two months to replace the "NON Y2K COMPLIANT" mainframe that was discovered last April. As of this date, the county health inspectors reports are logged manually, and the administrations reports are tediously and manually generated from the field inspectors notes. Laptops can not download the inspectors report to the mainframe.

Multnomah is seat to the largest population in the state of Oregon, which has approximately 2,400 restaurants. The largest city in the county is Portland, Oregon.

This of course has made it difficult, if not impossible to track outbreaks, such as the salmonella outbreak, with the effectiveness previously enjoyed. No comparisons of related data can be made under such restraints.

This was NEVER mentioned in any of the Y2K meetings that I attended, including the the televised Y2K Community Conversation, attended by all the Brass in town as well as Clinton's spin doc.

-- Michael (mikeymac@uswest.net), February 11, 2000

Answers

I believe the reaction from Washington would be that this is a "local, anecdotal" problem. If it's reported only on the local news, it's "anecdotal", unless you can also get the New York Times to cover it.

Never heard of Multnomah County before, so I guess the Feds haven't either. Oh, Portland is located there? Did you mean Portland, OR or Portland, ME? Who cares -- it's all local.

Notice, by the way, that this wasn't a three-day "snowstorm" situation; if their latest estimate is correct, they will have missed the 12/31/99 deadline by roughly 3.5 months.

Ed

-- Ed Yourdon (ed@yourdon.com), February 11, 2000.

Hi Michael! Nope, we never heard of this either, not whispered at any of doze meetings.

Last night we attended a Multnomah County meeting, topic caregiving, more cluelessness, BUT again ppl sincerely trying to understand and 'remediate' issues. There is a certain undercurrent of grassroots activism in Portland that delights us :-)

Ed, you provincially polyanally sarcasming? ;^)
That's temptaciously contagious!

Michael, we're still doing the lung cancer pt, so gotta put in our time before another roundelview, and then obviously not in any restaurant! How 'bout a picnic of preps peppered with crow? Our treat, and such an unexpected miracle of a munchie!

Salmonurpa is nuttin to sneeze at ...

-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), February 11, 2000.

I remember a earlier (mid December?) post from a programmer who was contracted to work on a State agency project. He claimed that the agency mainframe would only be 25% repaired, and that all external information from other state sites could not be input to the mainframe except through the mainframe terminal itself. My understanding was that it was the Fish and Game department? I haven't heard any information since about this either. I wonder if Oregonians are getting the real status of other agnecies also.

-- K Taylor (KTaylorOre@webtv.net), February 11, 2000.