I guess the .01% (?????) failure rate was all in one place... <:)=

**As part of an experiment last year, technicians at the huge Xingo hydroelectric dam on Brazil's Sao Francisco River set the dates on the plant's main computer forward to Jan. 1, 2000.

**What happened next is still sending chills through Latin America.

**"When they put the date forward, the whole control board went haywire," remembers Marcos Ozorio, one of the members of Brazil's presidential Year 2000 commission. "Twelve thousand warning lights flashed all across the board, with all kinds of alarm information."

**Technicians quickly switched back the date, and are now ferreting out the plant's Y2K bugs. But "if you had been surprised by a situation like this, what you'd have had to do is shut down the plant until you found where the failures were," Ozorio said. "Automatically you'd be taking off the energy board 30 percent of northeast Brazil.

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), April 16, 1999

Answers

Sysman, do you have a link for this?

**"When they put the date forward, the whole control board went haywire," remembers Marcos Ozorio, one of the members of Brazil's presidential Year 2000 commission. "Twelve thousand warning lights flashed all across the board, with all kinds of alarm information." **

Sounds like the warning light and alarm *test* had an error. You know, the button you push or switch you flick so you can test the all of the bulbs, warning ones especially, since that is the best way to check for burned out buls and to make sure alarm owrk.

**remembers Marcos Ozorio, one of the members of Brazil's presidential Year 2000 commission**

He saw lights and heard alarms, He had no idea what the problem was or what caused it? Any information on what the real problem was?

-- Cherri (sams@brigadoon.com), April 16, 1999.

Sysman:

I'm not sure I understand the point. Are you claiming that all of the so called alarms generated were due to embedded chips? It doesn't say that anywhere nor does it even imply it. You know, there are software related Y2K issues to be resolved. Why is the quote from a "member of Brazil's presidential Year 2000 commission" and not an engineer or at the very least a manager from the plant in question?

More importantly, isn't this the kind of story that you want to hear, i.e. that someone did run a test to identify where the problems were and are now fixing them before the millennium roll over? I read an earlier thread on this forum where people were complaining about a test which was run and no errors were found, saying that obviously the engineers were incompetent or were hiding the truth. Here is a case where they ran a test and reported errors were found and you complain abaout this too.

Finally, I question his assertion that you would have to shut the plant down if you had all of these alarms going off. If this is a hydroelectric plant, you don't have nearly as many safety related issues as in a fossil or nuclear fuel based power plant so there are many ways of manually operating significant portion of the plant without completely shutting it down. But the probability of this scenario happening at the roll over has already been set to zero becaus ehtey have done the testing and are now doing the remediation so the hypothesis is flawed.

Enlightened enough?

RMS

-- RMS (rms_200@hotmail.com), April 16, 1999.

Well I tried to find more information about this - darned if I can find anything but the quote above. Moreover, I have to wonder about just what kind of test they were running. Synchronization is important in a lot of stuff, and if someone tried to set up the clocks on the monitor panels one at a time you could see a lot of unexpected problems not related to Y2K in any way. But there just is not enough information in this for me to make a meaningful comment - it isn't enough to prove it was the fault of either hardware or programs in ROM, that's for sure.

-- Paul Davis (davisp1953@yahoo.com), April 16, 1999.

Sysman,

It's .001% (not ".01%"), and that figure comes from the Gartner Group. Y2K'ers have been delighted to use Gartner's figures in the past; they should be willing to accept them now, don't you think? :)

(Or is Gartner going to be cast into Outer Darkness with poor de Jager for daring to buck the Party Line?)

From the original Chicago Tribune article (not the highly-edited version available at various Y2K sites):

In Latin America, where planes, phones, computers, power grids, hospitals and the government itself rarely work like clockwork anyway, few people are seriously worried about Y2K.

... which makes me suspect that the "sending chills" comment was a bit of poetic license on the part of the two reporters. Remember, when you get to a big paper like the Trib, you think "Pulitzer" every time you write something. :)

Even assuming that the reporters got the story right (which is not guaranteed by any means -- reporters in general have a great deal of trouble covering technical issues; witness the recent coverage of the Melissa virus non-event), I told you that you could find exceptional examples.

It's only natural that, during Y2K testing, some problems will show up. The point here is that they DID the tests. The problem is being fixed. It is infuriating that Y2K'ers take these examples and use them to incite public concern needlessly.

If they were to do nothing, you'd worry. OK, so they make tests, and you STILL worry. How do they satisfy you? They can't.

I stand by what I said. Physics is physics and facts is facts. Digging through all news reports from around the world to find a few exceptional cases doesn't prove a point, because I could still argue that, on that same date, there were literally thousands of other failures and problems in everything electronic, and we worked around them.

For that matter, Brazil worked around this one (again, assuming the story is accurate -- which I do not grant by default). They quickly corrected the problem and, aside from a few soiled britches on the part of the personnel [g], nothing really bad happened.

--Stephen
http://www.wwjd.net/smpoole

-- Stephen M. Poole, CET (smpoole7@bellsouth.net), April 16, 1999.

This article was covered last month in thread

did you all notice this y2k power plant example in that chicago trib story? at http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=000dliin the Utilities category of Older Messages.

-- No Spam Please (No_Spam_Please@anon_ymous.com), April 16, 1999.

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Why does the forum software split "</blockquote>"?

-- No Spam Please (No_Spam_Please@anon_ymous.com), April 16, 1999.

I hate to seem to be picking at nits here, but why on earth are they trying to put Brazil in any classification but South American? They don't even speak Spanish in Brazil - they speak Portugese.

-- Paul Davis (davisp1953@yahoo.com), April 16, 1999.

Sorry, I don't have a link or any other information on this article. It was posted about a month ago by Mr. Drew Parkhill, CBN News. My resaon for posting it again was to see if any of you did have any more information, and also just to get your comments. Thanks for your replys. <:)=

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), April 16, 1999.