Here's one that Larry Sanger found on WorldNet Daily. I don't recall seeing anything about this around here, although I certainly may have missed it. If this is true, it's pretty bad. Much of this article is about the April 9 drill and a document that "appears to tell participants in tomorrow's drill that the main purpose of the drill is to provide a positive public relations event. Tests of complicated and questionable systems are to be left out, and everything is to be kept simple..."

We all knew that, this however is different:

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/bluesky_bresnahan/19990408_xex_power_utilit.shtml

(Big snip)

"A recent memo from NERC to the nation's power suppliers was provided to WorldNetDaily by a concerned source. A call to an electric company worker confirmed that the document was real and that there may be reason for concern.

"It seems clear to me that there is a direct effort to cover up the problems in this industry. The public is not being told the truth, and there is an official plan to deceive them even more," he stated on condition of anonymity. "They are cooking the books to look much better than they are. This test on April 9 is nothing more than a public relations stunt," he charged.

The memo was also verified as genuine by Gene Gorzelnik of NERC public affairs. That memo tells power companies to withhold information about Y2K problems from the public and from the Department of Energy.

"All identified exceptions will be held in strict confidence and will not be reported to DOE or the public. The exceptions will be reviewed by NERC Y2K project staff for reasonableness and reliability impact on operations into the Year 2000," the memo said in part.

"It's perfectly true what it says," Gorzelnik confirmed, but he defended that plan by saying the information being kept from the public and the government would only complicate rather than help the process.

"When we were working on the January report (required each quarter detailing progress), one of the things that we realized was that there were a number of utilities that weren't going to be making the June 30 target date we had established (to be Y2K ready)," Gorzelnik explained.

NERC learned that many utilities would not be Y2K ready by the June 30 deadline, but that they would become Y2K ready at a later date. A decision was made to permit power companies to report that they are Y2K ready by June 30 if they list separately any exceptions to being ready.

Those exceptions might include things such as not being able to fix a Y2K problem until a scheduled maintenance period that falls after June 30. Power companies will also be permitted to claim Y2K readiness on time if their mission critical systems are ready even though other systems are not ready. Companies waiting for vendors to provide new software or hardware which will not be delivered by June 30 will also be able to claim they are Y2K ready on time. Such exceptions are not considered necessary to report to the Department of Energy or to the public.

"We came up with the idea of the Y2K exceptions report. 'I will be Y2K ready except for XYZ piece of equipment that will not be available because the vendor won't be able to supply the hardware for it until August 17,'" Gorzelnik gave as an example.

"We felt that to put out raw data, it could very easily be misunderstood," he explained of the need to keep the details under wraps.

Companies have been sending NERC exception reports since January. The reports are not specifically a part of the drill on Friday. NERC is questioning utilities that have large exceptions lists to be sure that their reliability to provide power to their customers will not be impacted by those exceptions.

"One of the concerns was that if it went in to DOE it would become public knowledge and the whole process that we have been working with is one where we want the utilities to be frank with us to tell us exactly what is going on so we can work back and forth and get the problem solved," said Gorzelnik.

"If information was made public then we and the utilities were concerned that the utility itself would be spending so much time answering questions from reporters and their customers that it would divert from the actual job of getting the facility ready for Y2K. That's all that was behind that. They are taking a statement out of context and blowing it up without looking at all of the factors that went into that statement being there in the first place," he complained. "

Don't forget to check out Sanger's Review. (I haven't seen Larry's take on this yet. Should be posted shortly.)

-- pshannon (pshannon@inch.com), April 12, 1999

Answers

Watch for the (at least) three stories:

what we get told at the time. what the official report says what the stories are after the event is seen as no longer mattering or is over taken by larger issues requiring yet another version.

To everything there is a spin...

-- Bob Barbour (r.barbour@waikato.ac.nz), April 12, 1999.

Yes, this was discussed here a few weeks ago. Doesn't it give you a feeling of confidence on NERC's reports?

FWIW, on another forum Bonnie Camp, I believe, speculated that since NERC cannot require utilities to tell all, some provision for confidentiality may have been regarded as necessary to at least get them to mention some of their problems to NERC.

Jerry

-- Jerry B (skeptic76@erols.com), April 12, 1999.

Correction: (I replied before reading your entire post) the NERC memo providing for the exception reporting was discussed here a few weeks ago; Gorzelnik's comments were not, as far as I can recall, published at that time.

Jerry

-- Jerry B (skeptic76@erols.com), April 12, 1999.

For what it's worth, I'm a person who has been submitting monthly reports to NERC (yes, even an exception report), and I was the drill coordinator for my company.

At no time was I instructed to withhold negative information about the drill; we were interviewed by the local media and told them of the problems we found. These problems will be in the final report as submitted to NERC, and will be submitted to our utility commission, so it will become public record. If all drills had worked perfectly, it would have been a complete waste of time.

Dan.

-- Dan (dgman19938@aol.com), April 13, 1999.

Dan, is it Dan the electronics engineer ? What company do you work for that is ready? Who verified it??

-- R. Wright (blaklodg@aol.com), April 13, 1999.