Yesterday, I attended a Team Florida Year 2000 Symposium in Panama City, Florida. I wasted 2 1/2 hrs. Usual reps from the utilities and from DELTA (the planes are not going to fall out of the skies). I've got all my utilities book-marked and check on them regularly, so I learned nothing new. New spin on electricity. Mr. Steve Higginbottom was representing Gulf Power ( a 'child' of Southern Co) and he said that electic outages were due to mainly 3 things: weather--lightning wild creatures--squirrels, snakes etc that get into whatever wild creatures--11P.M.-4P.w. Drunks that run into telephone poles He is very concerned that people will be running into telephone poles, celebrating New Year's and other people will have electrical outages and PANIC and blame it on y2k DuffyO

-- DuffyO (duffyo@mailcity.com), July 22, 1999

Answers

If someone knocks over a local distribution pole, at worst a few blocks will be affected. Chances are you'd be able to look out of the window and see that there are lights on elsewhere (in a town, that is). If not you could phone friends. As a last resort, use your radio.

Now, if the phone isn't working, and the mobile phone isn't either, and there's no lights to be seen anywhere, and all the radio stations have gone quiet, panic may well be appropriate.

When London got hit by the 1987 "hurricane", the whole city was blacked out for about 12 hours. The phones still worked; that was my first reaction, to phone around and establish that the (unexpectedly severe) storm had been massively destructive over a wide area. My second reaction was to listen to my radio, which confirmed the nature of the problem.

Preparation essential: at least one battery portable radio. Preferably two or more, preferably one with short wave as well (so you can investigate what's going on world-wide).

-- Nigel Arnot (nra@maxwell.ph.kcl.ac.uk), July 22, 1999.

Todays Daily Oklahoman (the newspaper for Oklahoma City) has an article on the front page of the business section that the utilities are Y2K Ready, and that there should be no problems if people will "only behave normal". Seems like they don't want people to flip the light switch around the midnight time frame.

Considering where I work, and that we may be MANDATED to turn off all of our computers for the actual roll-over, wonder how the utility company feels about 200 or so computers being fired up at/around the same time frame from just our little shop? And no... I'm not talking about all PC's here either.... Will they ask us to "behave" normal and not turn them back on?

-- (cannot-say@this.time), July 22, 1999.

Duffy, I also live in Florida. Basically I heard the same stuff... everything is Y2K OK.

However, Last month Palm Beach County aired its community conversations Y2K forum on the local government cable channel. Well the director (don't remember his name) of Team Florida 2000 stated that if the electricity goes out on January 1, 2000 it won't be because of Y2K problems. It will be because of the "Bubba Effect." He explained that if electricity goes out it's because Bubba was drinking too much on New Year's Eve and ran into an electric pole. I kid you not! That's what he said.

Also, if you want to check out progress on Florida utilities go to www2.scri.net/psc/y2ksum2.html (I'm link-impaired).

-- (To Shy@tosay.com), July 22, 1999.