In February of this year, I attended a presentation by Rick Cowles, a summary of which I wrote up for this forum. Believe me, he certainly did not make any claims to the effect that on 1/1/2000 at 00:00 the power grids would collapse. However, he did in no uncertain terms state that we could be in for some very rough times in early 2000.

For anyone who is interested, here is a link to the thread:

notes on R.Cowles' "Will the Lights Stay On in the Year 2000?" presentation on 2/26/1999
http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=000YTQ

-- Jack (jsprat@eld.~net), December 31, 1999

Answers

So far the embedded problems seems OK, i.e.no power failures apparently anywhere [other than Texas Nik?], no nuke problems even in Russia.

So far I don't but any of this. Yes I'm pleased that there is no loss of life etc., no I don't buy the uniform happy happy smiley smiley media spin.

Very early days - wait and see how baking clearing and settlement works out - that will be Monday night. Even then it will take time for problems to surface. Wait and see on energy and JIT.

Bad code doesn't just go away.

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), December 31, 1999.

Hopefully you will.

-- Look (at@the.facts), December 31, 1999.

Heres what he said this week:

link

To Rick Cowles: As the Leading Expert in Electric Utilities, Is this still your basic assessment?

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.

Y'know, Mabel, it's been quite awhile since I read that interview (the interview was conducted in October 1998 and wasnn't published until December, 1998). I just went back and read the entire thing, and it was kind of a surreal experience. There was very little in the interview that I would change even today.

My views, as expressed in the snippet you posted above, remain pretty much unchanged.

The only place that I think I *really* missed the boat was on my read of what the NRC's actions would be w/respect to nuclear plants. But, in my own defense, the comments were made based on regulatory requirements at the time of the interview. Shortly after the interview, the NRC changed the rules. They issued an addendum to their original Y2k guidance, and this addedum removed the requirement for attestment of Y2k compliance, by a corporate officer, under oath and affirmation. That was the biggie. I knew in October 1998, during the interview, that no corporate officer of any company in any industry could sign off on corporate compliance under the threat of prosecution.

Had that requirement remained, there would be no nuclear plant in the U.S. online right now.

I also misread the regulatory environment. Without casting any stones, I think that nowadays, the regulator is too beholden to (or influenced by) the regulatee (is that a real word??).

Alas, all of the above is now a sort of poste mortem. The die was cast many months ago. All we can do is wait and see what happens, and hope that TPTB were mostly right. I won't add a "because" to the last sentence. You can fill in that blank yourself. The "because" is why we're all here.

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

-- Mabel (mabel_louise@yahoo.com), December 31, 1999.

Gee, a thread that actually has cold hard facts instead of whining. How refreshing.

-- King of Spain (madrid@aol.cum), December 31, 1999.

Good post, Mabel. Rick Cowles has never been a "doomer." He's a respected professional; he has served as Y2K manager of utilities for Digital Equipment and as a director of research for TAVA, and he currently heads his own company. He has furnished congressional testimony on Y2K, and during rollover he is serving as technology expert on utilities for MSNBC.

-- Don Florence (dflorence@zianet.com), December 31, 1999.

Bad code doesn't go away. And bar code doesn't go away. STAY PREPPED from now on...

-- inever (inevercheckmy@onebox.com), December 31, 1999.

Andy:

Hi, good to see you're still out there. Where did everybody go earlier? I was totally lost without good info.

I'm very much of the same opinion as yours. And as RC pointed out again, testing of the embeds in the oil industry showed that they continue to look normal for 31 days and then they fail. So we are still early here. Yes had power gone down that would be the "smoking gun", but these eggs are going to take a while to hatch so don't count them quite yet.

I was and am fully prepared for 3-6 months of almost anything (except gangs - I'm in a big city and can't do anything about that, and don't/won't get a gun so I'm a sitting duck from that point of view and I'd have lived with that risk).

I had floated an idea here a while back that my guess was that the embeds probably only track time for a few secs to 30 days and once they've been in 00 time long enough so their stored dates are all 00 time they would not be as much as a problem. Well I'm not sure if I was right, but thinking that further I'm willing to guess that *most* probably just count time and don't have a date. As far as I can tell any system with time only will not have a problem. So as RC says I think oil, and other emebds tracking dates for longer periods, will still be a problem, but I don't think there will be many of them, although there could be some key ones (like oil) so you won't need many of them to have an effect.

With respect to the IT side of Y2K, there the dates are not stored for a short time and are not refreshed to 00 time as time goes by. The dates here are stored in databases *permenantly* so the moment they are used, now or 6 months from now they will create problems. So we can be sure that these problems are going to be there and will surface. Most of those systems off line right now for rollover and being a weekend are not in full production use. Wait until tomorrow when the techs bring them back up and then wait until Monday and they get their full loads.

If we don't have problems with power, water, sewer and gas. That is good because that means the immediate problems of chaos are avoided. But do not think the problem is not brewing longer term underground.

The best analagy I could come up with is that our systems are like finely tuned machine running on fine engine oil. Had the utils blown up today, that would be like throwing a wrench in the machine. That didn't happen. When IT starts to sputter next week, it will be like someone threw a mixture of molasses and sand in. It will really gum up the works. Things will work but it will be tough slogging and not all companies will have enough "power" to keep the wheels turning while they hire people to handle tasks manually, suffer loss of customer service, suffer loss of suppliers, etc. This will have a long term effect. Like cancer - doesn't kill you right away but silently keeps on doing its dirty work.

The question is just how bad is the cancer that is in IT. We know that some where between 1/3 and 2/3 of the systems that firms need weren't even fixed because they weren't "mission critical". But those systems were there for a reason and they can't be left offline indefinatley without serious economic consequences if the work is done using expensive manual labor in the mean time.

I have a very bad feeling that we are being lulled into a false sense of security and we are seeing the calm before the storm.

OT:

I will say one thing, and that is that I found ed's comment earlier idotic (something about the stuff shown on TVs is quite likly running off generators) and I would have expected a far more reasoned response from him and that did tarnish my respect for him considerably. Sorry Ed, but unless you retract those earler statments as a mistake or bad judgement, that's how I'll feel (not that you probably care).

Ed Yourden could you give me an opinion of current status?

-- Interested Spectator (is@the_ring.side), December 31, 1999.