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Township 'recovering' from bout with Y2K computer glitch

Friday, December 10, 1999

By Martin Visser The Grand Rapids Press

PARK TOWNSHIP -- Park Township officials admitted they were bitten by the "Y2K bug" earlier this month, but claim they still are confident the township is Year 2000 compliant.

Township Supervisor Stu Visser told the board Thursday a millennial mishap occurred when township employees tried to set up new water and sewer special assessments for the year 2000. The computer system refused to calculate the interest on those bills because of a glitch that makes computers unable to process dates beyond 1999, which has come to be known as the Y2K bug.

It brought work in the office to a temporary halt.

"You think everything's going along fine and then wham, it hits," Visser said.

Despite the brief shutdown, the township was able to get the problem fixed right away, the supervisor said. The person who wrote the software for the township's computer system several years ago had since become a full-time employee and was there to fix the problem right away.

"She came in and knew right where to go to fix it. We had it running in a few minutes," Visser said.

Aside from that one mishap, the supervisor said he is confident the township is ready for the millennium.

All of its other systems have been checked for Y2K compliance and several new pieces of computer hardware have been brought in to replace equipment "that did not pass the county's test," he said.

Township staff is so confident of its systems, in fact, it is not making any special emergency preparations for the new year as some other West Michigan communities have done.

Instead, the township will rely on the emergency preparations being made by the Red Cross and Ottawa County.

"If this is a situation where the power goes down for a few hours, we'll probably treat it the same as any other power outage. But if it's going to be a long period time, I think we're definitely going to have an emergency meeting," Visser said.

-- Homer Beanfang (Bats@inbellfry.com), December 10, 1999

Answers

Lucky township. Hate to think about all those systems written by people no longer around.

-- fatanddumb (fatdumb@nd.happy), December 10, 1999.

This caught my eye:

"The person who wrote the software for the township's computer system several years ago had since become a full-time employee and was there to fix the problem right away. "

This is a not certainly not typical. But it was very fortunate for them.

-- Arnie Rimmer (Arnie_Rimmer@usa.net), December 10, 1999.

... and a year for testing?

They're very lucky - this time.

--- OT

Homer - Homer - Homer: PLEASE turn off the "Reply via email" option when you submit a new thread!

I love your input - but keep getting error messages that the system can't reply to the email "inbellfry" address.

Thanks.

-- Robert A. Cook, PE (Marietta, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), December 10, 1999.