In your interview with Drew Parkhill, you stated the following:

I've said this to you and a million other people: this isn't going to be a big bang on 1-1-2000.

Again, to try explain this in layman's terms: any large system has a certain amount of fault tolerance built into it. It's designed to be able to operate even if you've got some faults in there, because in a large complex system, Murphy's Law is going to be in there some place. And something's not going to be operating. So there is always a certain amount of fault tolerance.

The Western power outage in 1996 was a pretty good illustration of this. When you have multiple faults in a large complex system happening at the same time, you start to get a propogation of faults at an increasing rate over a period of time. And at some point in time that fault propogation is not linear, it goes exponential. And when that fault propogation goes exponential, that's the point where you reach critical mass and systems start failing.

As time progresses, and those faults begin building up in the system, and capacity issues start to come into play, what I'm concerned about is seeing the system absolutely stressed to a breaking point. In my worst-case scenario, if regional transmission facilities hit a critical mass of fault propogation, you're going to start seeing some real regional issues. I don't expect to see that kind of thing really play out in the first day or two after 1-1-2000. If you asked me to try to nail down a timeline, strictly off the top of my head, I'd say two weeks after 1-1-2000, and then you'll see a slow recovery for 15 or 30 days to some kind of equilibrium where you've at least got some degree of reliability just about everywhere.

You're going to see isolated dark spots here and there. You're going to see brown spots here and there. But you're going to see more light spots than brown or black spots.

Will Electricity Flow In The Year 2000? An Interview With Y2K Power Expert Rick Cowles

Do you stand by this assessment, or, in the alternative, do you have an update?

-- mabel (mabel_louise@yahoo.com), December 28, 1999

Answers

Specifically, what of this statement?

"If you asked me to try to nail down a timeline, strictly off the top of my head, I'd say two weeks after 1-1-2000, and then you'll see a slow recovery for 15 or 30 days..."

-- mabel (mabel_louise@yahoo.com), December 28, 1999.

Rick,

What is your opinion of this statement?

``Utilities are scared,'' said Cameron Daley, chief operating officer of Framingham, Massachusetts-based Tava/R.W. Beck, which tested and upgraded systems for more than 100 U.S. utilities. ``The whole grid won't collapse, but there will be outages that could last up to several weeks.''

Utilities Say They're Y2K Ready, Though Blackouts Expected, Washington, June 30 (Bloomberg)

-- mabel (mabel_louise@yahoo.com), December 28, 1999.

WWwtWtWTaY2K Part X

-- Lane Core Jr. (elcore@sgi.net), December 28, 1999.

Mabel - check this thread for response (where you earlier asked the same question):

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0027cA

-- Rick Cowles (rick@csamerica.com), December 28, 1999.

Thanks Rick!!!

I will crosslink these threads.

Do you have an opinion as to duration?? Cameron Daley predicts "several weeks" of power outages.

Several weeks.

link to first thread

-- mabel (mabel_louise@yahoo.com), December 28, 1999.