*OT*
I haven't read the article yet, but Wired's wild swings between extreme optimism (did you read "The Coming Boom" about 6 months back?) and extreme pessimism have me about ready to cancel my subscription.
My guess is that the utilities are scared out of their minds by the idea of Y2K being the first Big Challenge they'll face after deregulation and are devoting all available resources to the problem. So are their vendors.
There may very well be spotty outages, but I doubt we'll see anything close to, say the disruption caused by the 1998 ice storm. (For those of you outside the northeast, a full week of freezing drizzle physically collapsed the power lines throughout northern Vermont, New Hampshire, New York and Maine, and southern Quebec province. It took close to a month to restore everything. To the best of my knowledge, those areas did not revert to the Stone Age.) Certainly not The End of Civilization As We Know It.
It sounds like bragging to say that engineers can fix just about anything given sufficient resources, but it's true. They become engineers in the first place because they take stuff that doesn't work as a personal affront. The talent to fix this exists, and I guarantee the utilities will allocate the resources.
(Even further OT) One of the reasons why the northeast didn't revert to the Stone Age is that human communities respond well to shared problems. If you bounce a check because there's no money in your account, the merchant strings you up. If no one in town can get money out of the bank because the power grid or the financial network is down, the merchant is much more likely to extend credit.
Katherine
PS What does all this mean for the utilities themselves? Major costs to fix it, major lawsuits if they don't. I wouldn't want to be a shareholder or a insurer. |
