Sorry to be repetitive. But people seem unaware ...

Link to previous thread:

Now, WHAT did "doomers" like Rick Cowles actually SAY about electricity and Y2K?

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

Answers

Now it's two weeks......first it was by summer......then at the end of the year....now two weeks.........you just want SOMETHING to happen eventually, don't you?

-- Move-On (Get @Grip.com), December 31, 1999.

Thanks, Mabel; I was afraid that here was no reason for all the doomers to remain here to be laughed at. Now we can continue teasing them for a couple more weeks.

And a couple more, and a couple more...

-- jumpoff joe a.k.a. Al K. Lloyd (jumpoff@ekoweb.net), December 31, 1999.

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

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

Go for it, Mabel.

Per Ed Yourdon:

"The most likely scenario, in our opinion, is the blackout that lasts for a couple days; a less likely scenario, but one we feel should not be ignored, is the one-month blackout. Why? Because it could take that long to fix whatever Y2000 problems are discovered in the hours after midnight on December 31, 1999; and it could take that long to restart the system."

-- Hoffmeister (hoff_meister@my-deja.com), December 31, 1999.