OT. U.S. Embassy Staff To Flee Y2K Glitch
By Melissa Akin
STAFF WRITER
MOSCOW - The U.S. State Department is predicting prolonged computer failure-led disruptions in Russia after New Year's Day 2000, and is paying to fly the staff of the Moscow Embassy back home en masse, the State Department has announced.
Any staff member judged nonessential by the chief of mission in Moscow gets a free ticket home, news agencies reported on Friday after the "authorized departure" policy was announced in Washington.
Other embassies and multinational companies are already talking of following suit. The British Embassy, for example, has gone back and forth on whether it will pull out staff, and has decided to let non-essential staff pull out if they request to, a spokesman said.
And the consulting company Arthur Andersen plans to leave only a skeleton crew on hand in Moscow to greet the new millennium.
"We're very well prepared internally, so I don't fear any hiccups," said Hans Jochun Horn, managing partner of Arthur Andersen CIS. "But there will be problems with utilities - gas, water, whatever. If you go to those [Russian utilities] organizations, they cannot guarantee they will be able to cope with whatever is coming."
Should Y2K-related troubles persist after Jan. 10, when Horn's staff is to return from its extended New Year holiday, he plans to have satellite telephones on hand and is considering pooling resources with other firms to buy a set of generators.
"Some multinationals are doing things like setting up crisis centers with emergency power, having satellite telephones or doing things like draining radiators before New Year's so in case there is power or heat failure, they don't have to worry about damage to facilities," said Ron Lewin, managing director of the computer firm Terralink and head of the IT committee at the American Chamber of Commerce.
"But all are taking organizational steps. Y2K contingency planning is 20 percent or 30 percent technical and 70 percent organizational," he said. That means "developing schedules, developing emergency plans so staff know what to do in this or that situation."
Unilever, for example, has given the employees of its Moscow office dozens of pages of guidelines that lay out situation-by-situation responses to possible Y2K eventualities, said Unilever corporate affairs director Maxim Pavlushin.
"[Y2K] is a sophisticated thing and a lot has to do with perception," Pavlushin said. "We think that being responsible for our employees, we have to look at every possible malfunction."
Unilever is also keeping employees on hand to deal with Y2K glitches - more than would stay in Moscow over the holiday in an ordinary year, Pavlushin said.
But many companies that don't have to operate are simply shutting down, Lewin said. "It isn't that different from their ordinary plans [because these companies let most employees out for holidays anyway]. In this case it makes a lot of sense," he said.
Horn said that Arthur Andersen was not actively encouraging expatriates to leave, and added that some wanted to ring in the New Year here. For those employees, Arthur Andersen has suggested in an internal memo that they stock up on household necessities well before Jan. 1.
Together with China and Indonesia, Russia ranks as one of the most Y2K disruption-prone countries in the world, according to U.S. government reports.
U.S. and Russian officials say nuclear doomsday scenarios - such as a meltdown at one of Moscow's several nuclear reactors - are unlikely.
But Russia could expect "a month of disruptions in financial markets, two months for utilities and health care, and up to three months of turmoil in transportation and telecommunications," the U.S. Senate 2000 technology problems said in a report issued last month.
"It won't be Jan. 1 that smoke starts coming out of the back of the computers," Lewin said. "The computer disruptions will probably peak around Jan. 4 or 5, when companies start coming back after closing down for New Year's"
One option for those worried about Y2K fallout is the Millenium Pac, a survival kit being marketed over the Internet at drparsley.com.
For $2,600 including shipping, the London-based Dr. Parsley company will send St. Petersburg expatriates a kit for a four-person family that includes two weeks of supplies - everything from Heinz Baked Beans and Kraft Cheesey Pasta to Quilted Velvet toilet tissue - and equipment such as solar-powered radios and sleeping bags.
Mehmet Golhan, a former investment banker who founded the e-commerce firm a few months ago, said in a telephone interview from London that his survival kit is based on recommendations from the American Red Cross and the IBM corporation.
Dr. Parsley's kits are aimed mostly at the U.K. market and at Western expatriates abroad, Golhan said - though the company could modify kits upon request to include everything from crates of champagne to Geiger counters and radiation-resistant clothing.
The kits may prove a tough sell in Russia, however.
"Russians are adjusted already to having contingency plans for day-to-day necessities, and large parts of the country already function in what are equivalent to Y2K conditions, without, say, water or gas or heat or electricity or banking," said Lewin. "Expats may not be as robust as their native hosts. Nevertheless people in Russia have to be - by process of elimination - hardened to conditions."
times.spb.ru
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