Below is the text of a letter I sent to the author of a 1/18/99 ComputerWorld article on the power grid, Utilities Say They're Nearly Ready for Y2K:

Dear Ms. King,

Your latest ComputerWorld article ("Utilities Say They're Nearly Ready for Y2K") is one of the worst cases of misrepresentation of the facts and/or slipshod reporting that I've seen regarding Y2K (and I've read a lot of poor journalistic attempts in this area over the past year and a half).

For example, let's examine the validity of your introductory statement: "With testing and remediation completed at more than half of about 3,000 power companies in the U.S. and Canada, "we're finding very little that will cause a unit to trip out of service," said Gerry Cauley, year 2000 project manager at the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC)."

Please tell me your source for the "fact" that testing and remediation is complete at more than half the 3,000 power companies in the U.S. and Canada. According to the figures that NERC used in their most recent report, only FIVE (or 2.65%) of the SURVEYED utilities (188) responded that they were 100% done with critical remediation and testing. You can check out this raw data for yourself at: ftp://ftp.nerc.com/pub/sys/all_updl/docs/y2k/november1998.xls

Bonnie Camp, who is NOT a journalist but has obviously done much more research on this issue than you did before you wrote your article, has analyzed the latest report by NERC. She has written a good synopsis of where the power industry is in the remediation/testing process based on NERC's own survey data. Should you actually want to look at some hard data, and not the PR spin, you can find her assessment at: http://www.cbn.org/y2k/insights.asp?file=990114o.htm

To quote from Ms. Camp's article, "Seventeen percent of the utilities which responded to the NERC November survey estimate they have completed 10% or less of their fixing and testing of critical systems. 16 utilities have not done any remediation or testing yet.... Just 34%, or one-third of the utilities have completed more than 50% of critical systems remediation and testing. Two thirds (66%) have completed 50% or less of their remediation for critical systems."

If you actually care about the truth, I strongly urge you to do more thorough research before you make such patently false statements such as the one above. Such articles present a very distorted (and untrue) picture of where the power industry is in their Y2K remediation efforts.

Sincerely,
Nabi Davidson

-- Nabi Davidson (nabi7@yahoo.com), January 20, 1999

Answers

Should I receive a response from either the author or the editor of ComputerWorld, I will post it on this thread.

-- Nabi Davidson (nabi7@yahoo.com), January 20, 1999.

An excellent letter. Computerworld of course can print only a small fraction of the letters they receive, and they do so in the letters column without editorial response.

I doubt the writer was deliberately misleading the readers. He had numerous assignments, a preconception that the y2k problems at the utilities was small, he read the summary, got a quote, slapped out the story and went on.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), January 20, 1999.

Here is the reply I received from the author of the ComputerWorld story, Ms. King:

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From: "Julia King" (Julia_King@cw.com)
To: Nabi Davidson (nabi7@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1999 13:14:40 -0500
Subject: Re:

Dear. M. Davidson,

Thank you for your letter. I will look at the web site you list and read Ms. Camp's analysis. For your information, the figures I used in my story are taken directly from the NERC report (and statements made at a Washington, D.C. press conference on 1/11/98). Specifically, on page 9, the report states that 98% of the electricity supply and delivery orgs. in North America (of which there are approx. 3,000) have participated in NERC's Y2k assessment surveys and that as of the 4th Q of 1998, 44% of these organizations had completed remediation and testing. At the press conference, that figure was re-stated to 50% having completed remediation/testing.

I have no vested interest in misrepresenting the facts, doing my job in a slipshod manner or adding to what sounds like your library of poorly written/reported stories about utilities and the year 2000. If I made a mistake, I made an honest mistake and will clarify/correct it in print.

Again, thank you for bringing this to my attention.

Sincerely,
Julia King

-- Nabi Davidson (nabi7@yahoo.com), January 22, 1999.