Please feel free to forward this newsletter to as many friends as possible. I have a personal goal of reaching one million readers. I can achieve it with your help.
the Software View: What, me worrY2K? or How I stopped worrying and learned to love the Year-2000 problem. (Part III)
Welcome back, gentle readers. For those of you with Web access and a Netscape Navigator browser, please click here:
http://www.softwareview.com/
Scroll down the page and you will notice a link entitled, "Daily view weblog". The daily news page is also known as a "web log". It is en vogue and the fashion of these days to call it that. Click on the link, click "reload" on your browser or clear your browser cache to ensure that you always receive the freshest, hottest daily news concerning JavaTM, Linux, XML, and the software industry! The link never changes, but I will be updating the HTML file page behind it every day. Please, do take a gander at it every day.
Also, gentle readers, the Software View is an Associate Internet World Wide Web site of Amazon.com. I'd like to extend my sincere, heartfelt gratitude and thanks for your patronage. I'm offering links to books, et cetera that you can purchase from my web site. I'd greatly appreciate it if you would purchase software industry books from my web site. Help support my newsletter and web site by purchasing items from Amazon.com from my web site. Here is the URL (Uniform Resource Locator):
Click here
Now, dear readers, on with this week's episode of the Software View!
FRIGHT NIGHTS
With power to stop lights out, traffic will quickly turn chaotic. People will get trapped in elevators. Fire alarms will be tripped randomly. Security doors will be locked shut when they are supposed to be open, and stay open when they should be closed. Productivity will suffer as lawyers discover just how much they rely upon paper documents, whose retrieval will require hikes up tens of floors of darkened high-rises. Businesses will suffer the most. People will have nervous breakdowns. Some people will flourish during the electricity power outage; disasters, after all, sometimes speed up the normal process of dog-eat-dog. While other businesses will hurtle toward bankruptcy, others will begin buying them up. In the event of a Year-2000 problem electricity outage, do not count upon utilities to cover business losses. Even so, business monetary losses will not be the biggest casualties of the outage. It will be, as usual, confidence, a belief in the invulnerability of the power supply and the security of modern life.
People without power will discover just how many facets of their lives depend upon electricity. Their stoves, appliances, and heating will not work, and many telephones will go out of service. Electric utilities will be doubly confounded, since they depend upon customers' phone calls to alert them to power failures. Throughout the affected regions, all financial transactions will have to be in cash, since credit card swipes and automated teller machines will be useless. Drivers will be able to go only as far as the gas in their tanks will take them, because gasoline pumps will not work.
Most alarming and disturbing of all, water filtration plants will shut down, leaving affected areas with a four- to eight-hour water supply. Will officials choose to delay telling the public, lest the news exacerbate the crisis by provoking water hoarding? The dilemma that officials will face - essentially a choice between the collective good and individual rights - recurs often in disasters, and is usually decided in favor of the collective.
As reports and rumors of a water shortage will spread, consumption will jump by ten percent anyway, and bottled water will disappear from store shelves. Officials will consider evacuating metropolitan areas, but will drop the idea after they realize that an evacuation order will probably create additional chaos, as well as be a crippling blow to business people. By the end of the first day, city reservoirs will be nearly empty.
Electrical customers will soon discover that they can not trust their utility's power-restoration forecasts. To say the least, utility spokesmen will be inept. Utilities will plainly not know when power will be restored to individual customers, yet they will make a pretense of providing that information daily.
It is likely that any electricity power outages caused by the Year-2000 problem will produce public-relations debacles, since utilities will not immediately know what line of computer code is causing the outages, let alone how long the repairs will take. They will also underestimate the time needed to restore the electricity.
Without electricity power, many people will discover that their first source of support will not be their government, but their neighbors, who will band together in homes with foul, noisy generator-powered heat or wood stoves. The Year-2000 problem will be great way to meet the neighbors. Private property will become community property. Need a tool? Help yourself at any hour, no need to knock. The few, small generators will be dragged from home to home. As more generators are found, people will move into the warmer houses, while all along they will care for the elderly, infirm, and help families with small children to evacuate. These scenes will endlessly be repeated throughout the darkened landscape. In many cases, neighbors will get to know each other for the first time, and will draw mutual satisfaction from their combined and shared efforts.
This is typical of disasters: the force of nature or technology that causes the crisis will be perceived as the enemy, and people will join together to fight it. If a Year-2000 problem crisis occurs, such citizen participation will be crucial, because government agencies will be spread too thin. In any of the worst-case scenarios, the government can not shelter and feed the masses if there are electricity power outages and/or food shortages. People will need to be able to take care of themselves.
Y2K: THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONNECT
Electricity utilities will face a huge emergency task. While the Year-2000 problem alone probably will not cause much physical damage, the effort to restore power will require additional man-power. If many utilities are in trouble, the extra personnel will not be available. Each utility will have to rely upon its own resources.
The United States Army will promptly dispatch hundreds of thousands of troops - which will be the largest peacetime military deployment in American history - to conduct house-to-house checks of residents. That will turn out to be a very good thing, for state troopers, county sheriffs, and local police will be over-taken.
The Year-2000 problem will lay bare many municipalities' lack of emergency preparations, and those towns that have made contingency plans will discover that they will still depend upon help from neighboring areas, which will be just as incapacitated as they will be. As a result, townspeople will cope with the Year-2000 problem electricity power outage crisis by constantly improvising.
The guiding principle will be improvisation under pressure. Mayors will declare local emergencies when thousands of people take shelter in the gymnasiums of the local public high schools. Crisis communes and shelter communities will spring forth overnight from similar structures.
The shelters' immediate needs will be blankets, beds, candles, and medical supplies. Government officials will send police officers to find managers of local discount stores to order them to open their doors. Once inside, government aides will buy all the blankets in stock.
Among the shelter inhabitants will be an ample number of people - elderly, disabled, or mentally disturbed - who depend upon government financial support and typically live alone. These people think of their apartments as their stable reference point, and all of that will disappear. You will have young punks with spiked green hair and old people with bladder problems. You will have husbands who beat their wives and are not much nicer gentlemen in the shelter than they were at home, but they are sleeping next to people with psychiatric problems. At first, the shelter is fun for the children, it is like camping, but after a week they will get bored, and the parents will not know when it is going to be over.
The punks will be an immediate irritant. Despite the presence of a volunteer security force, they will try to steal unattended belongings. They will force children to give them objects they want, or else threaten to beat the kids ups. At night, they will go out for beer and will return drunk and rowdy. While the shelter's generator will provide minimal lighting and heating, the inhabitants will have to live without ventilation and hot water. As a result, no one will be bathed, and some people will not exactly be dirt-free before the crisis begins. Then, on some days, generators will break down, so the evacuees will spend nights without heat. The lack of ventilation will take its toll. Health authorities will declare epidemic outbreaks. The sanitation problems alone will be horrific.
Announcements will devolve into perpetual good news/bad news jokes. Public officials will function on only hours of fitful sleep per night. There would be one change too many for some evacuees. It will be so strange. Some people have never had to think or deal with something like that, and, all of a sudden, when you have to deal with it, you have only a few seconds to react. In fact, many of the elderly and invalid shelter inhabitants will like their new communal life so much that they will be reluctant to go home. The stress upon public officials will be almost unbearable.
One bit of Year-2000 problem conventional wisdom is that anyone facing surgery should avoid hospitals at the turn of the millenium. But the surgery will probably be successful, even as hospitals undergo turmoil. Hospitals will lose electricity and begin running on generators that already provide forty percent of their usual power supply.
When the generators break down, the staff will instantly switch to flashlights. For hours until the generators are repaired, hospitals will lose the use of their life-support and monitoring equipment: nurses will pump air, by hand, into the lungs of patients on respirators and manually take each patient's pulse and blood pressure every fifteen minutes. Instead of one nurse for each six patients, a ratio of at least one-to-one will be needed. Throughout the electricity power outages, elective surgeries will be canceled, but emergency operations will nearly double, without any evidence of increased risk to patients.
In the midst of all the dislocations, hospital employees will be fretful. They will not merely be care providers, but fellow victims, who will understandably be worried about the well-being of their families and homes. Medical directors will win back their attention by inviting their families to move in with them: hospitals will become hotels. Family members will sleep in auditoriums, gymnasiums, cafeterias, and hallways; rooms like radiology labs, used only during the day, will become night-time dormitories. Cafeterias will be open twenty-four hours per day, making stews, pastas, and pizzas.
Morale will soar. The crisis will invigorate staff members: they will like the feeling of being tested to their limits, of serving the common good in an emergency. Ordinary conflicts will fall away. People will volunteer for everything. If they are not officially working, they will stay in the wards to give a hand. Even administrators will feel appreciated: hospital personnel think of administrators as a bunch of paper pushers, but when they see them solving every problem and never leaving the hospital, they will see them as equals. They will get standing ovations in every room for months after.
Electricity power outage-related patients will include: victims of hypothermia, food poisoning, and carbon monoxide poisoning. The carbon monoxide victims will arrive at hospitals after getting sick from a generator or barbecue that will have been moved indoors for warmth. If someone in the basement of an apartment building moves a generator indoors, everyone on the ground floor and above will get poisoned. The number of carbon monoxide victims will dwindle after public officials will spread the word that generators belong strictly outdoors.
It will be flu season, and if you put thousands of people in shelters, one of them will sneeze and ten of them will catch the flu. Then, hospital personnel will get the flu. Then, chronically ill people, who will have spent extended periods in shelters, will begin showing the effects. Finally, hospital staffs themselves will grow exhausted. The crisis will lend hospitals a new sense of purpose, but it will be draining and disruptive. Hospitals will not fully return to normal for years.
IT'S ELECTRIC
Year-2000 problem worriers, take note: in an electricity power outage, generators are precious. During the crisis, they will save thousands of lives and businesses, and the effort to distribute, install and fuel them will perhaps be the most pivotal service that government will perform.
Among the first priorities for generators will be radio stations and/or designated emergency broadcasters. Since many listeners will be using transistor radios running on a limited supply of batteries, radio stations will reserve five minutes before the end of each hour for public-service updates. With Internet connections and television down, will radio stations become information and entertainment hubs?
If one had to choose between buying a generator or fire insurance, I would suggest one take the generator, because it comes in handy more often. Your major expense will be diesel fuel. About the only people who will be totally unaffected by the electricity power outage will be Amish families, who may embody the ultimate Year-2000 problem remedy: choosing to live without electricity. While people all around them will be busy staving off tragedy, the Amish will continue sending their children to school and go about completing their normal chores. During the possible upcoming Year-2000 problem electricity power outage, modern conveniences will be turned into inconveniences.
THE SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM
Edmund DeJesus writes, "if the sole result of Year-2000 was the utter failure of a computer system, that would be regrettable - not irreparable. Unfortunately, as with icebergs, what does the most damage is the part you can not see below the ocean's surface: Computer systems might run fine but produce incorrect information that is very difficult to detect. The problem is larger than most people think. First of all, it is not just software that is affected. Hardware also suffers from Year-2000 consequences; after all, a micro-processor chip is just software solidified and expressed in physical, integrated circuits. Year-2000 errors are already occurring. For example, recently a computer program determined that a prisoner's release date, 1/10/15, had passed, and he was almost released after serving only a few days. The program assumed that the date in question was 1915, not 2015, because the century had not been stored. On a lighter note, Centenarians and a few very old people have reported the receipt of letters assigning them to their new primary schools and received invitations to attend kindergarten because school-department computers can not tell a birth date in the 1890's from one in the 1990's. In one county in Washington state, cars with licenses expiring in 2000 were sent licenses for "horseless carriages". Multi-year projections have already begun to yield spurious results in insurance, demographics, bond maturities, and supply planning - because subtracting a date in the nineties from a date ending in "00" gives a negative number. For example, according to Boeing's Bob Jorgensen, Boeing knew in the early 1980's that the Year-2000 would cause problems. As with other aerospace companies, they must plan certain metal orders up to seven years in advance. Thus, they began noticing incorrect results as early as the year of 1993.
Huge financial and security systems may suffer Year-2000 confusion. In fact, the Cable News Network has reported that the New York Stock Exchange wants to close on the thirty-first day in December of the year of 1999, because its managers fear that all prior dealings could be accidentally invalidated due to Year-2000 errors. Malfunctioning programs will cause many businesses to lose track of critical systems, affecting production and cash flow. For organizations in the health and safety fields, repercussions could be dire, even life-threatening. Year-2000 confusion will also trigger legal witch hunts, as companies and governments try to pin the blame on someone.
Our interdependent world guarantees that each initial failure will have a ripple effect. If telecommunications systems go down, so do banking and financial systems. If an oil refinery can not produce gas or heating oil, trucks can not move products, and employees can not work in cold buildings. If thousands of false fire and burglar alarms go off, firefighters and police men can not tell which, if any, are the real ones.
To be continued ...
Sincerely,
Mark Kuharich
Join my free e-mail newsletter called the Software View by clicking here or by sending an e-mail to thesoftwareview-owner@west-point.org