These four paragraphs from the Abrams reports do not make me feel any more confident about the utility situation in this country.

>Also, we are working through our Federal Emergency Management Agency >to reach down to state emergency management officials and local >emergency management officials to get them prepared. > >In addition to getting them to become Y2K compliant with their own >systems, we need to get them prepared for the unique experience that >we may all encounter in 12 months because this will not be business >as usual in the emergency response world.

>We may have a situation of lots of small disruptions across the >country -- a small utility, a power plant out, a water purification >plant out in another community.

>These are situations that in usual times you might be able to call >on the state or the federal government to help solve, but we are >stressing to our local officials that they're going to have to take >care of these problems on our own.

First of all, the sentence where she says we can expect multiple outages...a small utility here (no big ones mind you!) a power plant there (are we talking coal or nuclear?)...a water utility somewhere else.

She describes the scenario as a "unique experience" in the emergency response world. Interesting way of putting it!

But what really concerns me is where she says that Federal and State emergency agencies will not be responding; they expect these emergencies to be taken care of at the local level. Great! This is especially un-nerving when we take into account her evaluation of State and local preparedness in this paragraph:

>A couple of other priorities over the coming year are certainly our >concern about the readiness of state and local government in our >country.

Exactly, what are the Federal and State agencies going to be doing that is more important that responding to a power plant or water utility site down?

-- Meg Davis (Meg9999@aol.com), December 31, 1998

Answers

That disturbed me too Meg.

Through the regular governemnt document search engine at http://www.info.gov/cgi-bin/search, I came up with a reference to Janet's e-mail address off a meeting report. I suggest we ASK her to respond.

Diane

vhttp://www.y2k.gov/new/min514.htm Janet Abrams, Council Executive Director, by E-mail at Janet_B._Abrams@who.eop.gov

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), December 31, 1998.

Diane - you are fearless. Whoooooaaaa. Go get it, woman.

I'd never have the cajohnes to do that. Waiting to hear what she says.. thanks in advance.

(DON'T DO IT! THEY'LL COME GET YOU!! WE NEED YOU HERE!!)

-- Lisa (nomail@work.com), December 31, 1998.

Meg -- herd control.


-- Leska (allaha@earthlink.net), December 31, 1998.

I just sent this email to Janet Abrams:

Janet,

In the spirit of cooperation, many of us would like to believe the government and industry can work together. A meaningful query of the "TRANSCRIPT: Abrams Cites Industry-Government Y2K Cooperation (Industry to help other groups become Y2K ready) is unfolding on Ed Yourdon's TimeBomb 2000 (Y2000) Q&A Forum.

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=000LVf

Can you participate with us?

Regards,

Critt Jarvis http://www.critt.com

-- Critt Jarvis (critt@critt.com), December 31, 1998.

Janet Abram's email auto-responder informs me that she is out of the office until 01/04/99.

Let's seem if we can come up with a helpful set of questions for her.

What might a cooperative process look like?

Critt

-- Critt Jarvis (critt@critt.com), December 31, 1998.

Critt,

I'll add ideas over the weekend. First, I want to go check out those searchable documents Meg found the search engine for on the USIA site before "composing" the diplomatic but pointed e-mail to Janet (and John) that, I WILL send. (Need to catch up on forum reading now).

People preparing to create community, have nothing to fear, but fear itself. Pretty soon I suspect the government types will welcome that type of assistance and support from the "grass-roots." Still don't trust 'em. But I'll TRY to work with the responsible ones, who recognize their bosses are "we the people" and have more concern for the potential loss of life rather than loss of the heavy metal.

Diane

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), December 31, 1998.

Question for Janet Abrams:

Excerpt:

"But let me comment also on a growing movement in our country -- I'm not sure if you've seen it in Italy -- and that is a movement of citizens coming together to do planning, to do local planning. They're calling it civic preparedness in their own communities.

Also we see this as a very healthy movement, and we're very supportive of it. We're not, as you might imagine, very excited about giving lots of attention to those people who say they need to buy a gun and move to the hills and take their dried food with them and their generator and they'll live on their own and they'll be protected through the Year 2000. We're not too excited about that group.

But there are some very responsible Americans coming forward and saying that our communities have got to come together and -- number one -- put positive pressure on their local leaders to do the work they have to do to fix their system and develop their contingency plans over the coming months.

And number two, they want to make sure as a community that if there are a few days of difficult transition into the Year 2000 that, for example, you might store some extra food in a local school building. Or make sure that there is a building that has a generator where people could go to as a shelter.

So we are supportive of those efforts that are grass roots, that are growing from the grass roots."

May question, Janet, is this:

Are you putting as much time and attention into developing relationships, connecting with well-established non-profit organizations who are already attending to local issues as you seem to be putting into the business sector?

A few examples can be found at: http://www.coalition2000.org/members.htm

How might your working groups help local communities connect, become resilient?

-- Critt Jarvis (critt@critt.com), December 31, 1998.

>what are the Federal and State agencies going to be doing that is more important that responding to a power plant or water utility site down?

Dealing with bigger problems than a single power plant or water utility.

-- No Spam Please (anon@ymous.com), December 31, 1998.

This topic spans at least two forums (this one and TimeBomb 2000) in several threads. I've started a dedicated Forum:

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a.tcl?topic=The%20Transcript

-- Critt Jarvis (critt@critt.com), December 31, 1998.

Here's another link that gets the article OK.

http://www.usia.gov/current/news/topic/global/98122301.ggi.html?/products/washfile/newsitem.shtml

http://www.cairns.net.au/~sharefin/Markets/Y2k.htm

-- Nick Laird (sharefin@cairns.net.au), January 02, 1999.