I found this at the Motley Fool discussion board:
(http://boards.fool.com/index.htm
Folder: Industry & Market Analysis/Year 2000)

Rohm and Haas has announced it will close all its chemical manufacturing facilities in December 1999 rather than risk a catastrophic event. They cite, among other things, the potential problems an electrical interruption can cause for a highly-automated chemical plant.

-- Tim (pixmo@pixelquest.com), December 24, 1998

Answers

BTW, this posting is towards the end of their thread. It's a long one, so just go to the end if you need to bookmark for references.

-- Tim (pixmo@pixelquest.com), December 24, 1998.

This was on there too :)

http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?id=1020040000216000&sort=post date

1. My bank's glitch will find a way to delete all of my deposit balances , but will charge me 100 yrs of service charges for having less than the required minimum balance. It will also find a way to keep the records of mortgage debt and car loan, but tell me I'm 100 yrs. overdue on each of them because it has no records of my payments, just my obligation to pay.

2. The IRS's glitch will find a way to lose my refund, and also the record of my quarterly payments, and charge me for 100 yrs of interest and penalties.

3. The Social Security Admin's glitch will find a way to lose the record of my lifetime payments, but decide that I owe all the lifetime payments in arrears becuase it does manage to have records of my adjusted gross income. It will stop sending checks no matter what.

4. The FAA's glitch will ground my 1999 holiday season's pre-paid flights, and the airline will lose my reservation and record that they received my payment, and refuse to refund it. Visa will claim I charged the tickets in 1909, and haven't made a minimum payment on it since then, at 22%.

5. My insurer's annuity servicer's glitch will lose all records of my right to benefits on any policies it is paying, but keep records of the extremely high premiums I owe.

6. My disability insurer or will cancel my benefits because it claims I haven't made the premium payments for 100 yrs. and have defrauded it into paying benefits becuase my age as stated on the application could not be true as its records show my age was understated by 100 yrs.

7. My utility providers will simply go dark, except for the billing office, which will charge me for 100 yrs of estimated useage, even if they didn't exist then. The good thing is that there won't be any services for them to shut off as a penalty.

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-- Leska (allaha@earthlink.net), December 24, 1998.

Another excellent article by Declan McCullagh, addressing several topics brought up on this forum:

http:/ /www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/16946.html

Clouds Loom For Chemical Makers

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-- Leska (allaha@earthlink.net), December 24, 1998.

Just taking reasonable precautions - and its a long weekend anyhow.

-- Paul Davis (davisp1953@yahoo.com), December 25, 1998.

Thanks, Leska. Yes, the article reporting the closing was mine. Y'all should check out http://www.well.com/user/declan/politech/ to stay abreast of what I write.

-- Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com), December 27, 1998.

# # # 19981227

Hello! Declan:

That URL isn't a good one. Could you please repost?

BTW: Do you know where I can find the source listing "three Georgia Banks" forced to "close" due to their Y2K ineptitude?

TIA!!

Keep up the great work, too!

Regards, Bob Mangus # # #

-- Robert Mangus (rmangus@mail.netquest.com), December 27, 1998.

The Rohm and Haas article didn't mention dates relative to the shutdown or re-opening of their plants. Did I miss something here?

-- dontlaffImnewat this (spirit@iserv.net), December 28, 1998.

I suspect they want to "announce it now" (to minimize stock flip/flops/panics and SEC actions then) - then will look at the actual situation and decide. No reason to expect them to know now enough to decide when they can restart safely.

The whole process requires water, power, controls, natural gas, suppliers, transport (to/from), a receiver of the product able to receive the tank loads of bulk products (else you pay tremedous demurage fees as product goes bad sitting in tank cars), pipelines, telecomm's along the pipelines, fire fighting, telephones, office services, QA and inspection labs, etc.

Just shutting down safely has to be a carefully planned event to avoid delays or explosions or bad product as you restart.

-- Robert A. Cook, P.E. (Kennesaw GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), December 28, 1998.