Here's an article I found on another site. Human error will start to
play more of a role in Y2K testing as evidenced by this new's piece.
Hey Cheeks, good news... The tests on the trading floor went smooth.
Can I print a balanced piece or what.<vbg> Please don't blame me
for spelling errors or any typo's. I just did the o'l cut'n paste.
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Y2K - Nuclear Power Plant
Compliance Test Goes
'Drastically Awry'
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writer
3-7-99
PEACH BOTTOM, Pa. - In a sterile room filled with rows of
hulking 1960s-era mainframes, complete with panels of blinking red
and green lights, a half-dozen technicians at the massive nuclear
power plant here set out early last month to test whether one of the
facility's critical computer units would understand the year 2000.
It was supposed to be a prosaic affair. The unit in question had been
pored over by programmers, it had been analyzed for a week in a
simulator, and it was being hooked up to a backup version of the
facility's central operations monitoring system.
But when the computer's clock was turned ahead to Jan.1, 2000,
something went drastically awry at the Peach Bottom Atomic Power
Station.
In what experts say was one of the more serious computer glitches in
recent memory at a nuclear plant, the facility's primary and backup
operations monitoring systems--which provide control-room technicians
with vital data about temperature, pressure and water levels in the
reactor's core--crashed. Every computer screen in the plant's control
room blacked out and froze, forcing technicians to rely on antiquated
gauges.
Plant managers say the incident posed no risk to the public, but they
nevertheless began planning to shut down the facility, which supplies
electricity to the Philadelphia area. They eventually scotched those
efforts after the computer specialists determined the source of the
problem--a technician had improperly set the test clock--and restored
the systems seven hours later.
Although the cause was human error, technology specialists say the
glitch here illustrates an unanticipated peril of the Year 2000
problem: As computer systems that have been repaired are now being
tested in live conditions, inadvertent mistakes and undiscovered bugs
can bring the machines--and the organizations that rely on them--to a
grinding halt.
"When you perform tests, you inevitably create some errors," said
John C. Ballock, a Year 2000 manager for Computer Sciences Corp.
With intensive Year 2000 testing taking place at almost every business
and government agency around the world, such glitches are "something
that we're definitely going to see more of," he said.
In Missouri, for instance, about 50,000 residential customers of the
Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District received incorrect bills last
month--each was charged for consuming exactly 800 cubic feet of water
in January--after a programmer failed to remove Year 2000 test data
from a billing system.
In Texas, 2,013 customers of Bank One Texas received erroneous notices
in December saying they had bounced checks after an employee
accidentally mailed out overdraft notices that had been printed for a
date-related test.
And in Illinois, the village of Oswego got a monthly electric bill
late last year for $7 million--about $6,989,000 more than the town
normally is charged each month--because of software "bugs" in a new
computer system purchased by Commonwealth Edison Co. to address the
Year 2000 issue.
The Year 2000 problem--dubbed Y2K--stems from the fact that millions
of electronic devices, from mainframe computers that process payroll
checks to heart monitors in hospital intensive-care units, were
programmed to recognize only the last two digits of a year and to
assume that the first two would be 1 and 9. When Jan. 1, 2000,
arrives, unrepaired machines will understand the year "00" not as 2000
but 1900, potentially causing them to shut down or stop working
properly.
Despite the glitches that have been cropping up, technology analysts
say testing is a critical part of the repair effort. It makes sense,
they say, to discover bugs and to deal with any instances of human
error now instead of later this fall or on Jan. 1.
"The fact that people are having problems now is a good thing
because it at least shows they're testing," said James Woodward, a
senior vice president at Cap Gemini America, an information technology
firm that provides date-related repair services.
To that end, 400 U.S. banks, brokerage firms and stock exchanges
embarked yesterday on the first stage of a seven-week program to
test their ability to trade stocks and other securities in the new
millennium. The test is being closely watched by technology analysts
because the securities industry has long been viewed as a leader in
addressing the Y2K issue and any problem could presage difficulties
in other sectors of the economy.
On Merrill Lynch & Co.'s football field-sized trading floor in New
York, a dozen traders spent the morning pretending it was Dec. 29
and conducting about 500 simulated transactions.
For trader Jason Horowitz, 29, the drill involved buying 1,000 shares
of Costco Wholesale Corp. at $71.75 apiece from fellow securities
firm Lehman Brothers. Working from an elaborate script that
specified just how many shares of what to buy from whom at which
price, Horowitz banged away at his computer terminal, quickly
entering abbreviations for the required information.
A few seconds later, the magic words appeared in blue text on his
screen: "Transaction Confirmed."
"This feels just like any other day, except that I'd probably be
wearing a tie," said a casually dressed Horowitz, as he entered orders
to sell 1,000 shares of 3Com Corp. and buy 1,100 shares of Intel
Corp. All told, he executed 13 trades and received similar
confirmation notices. "Everything seems to be going fine," he said.
Merrill executives and industry officials generally concurred with
that assessment, although they said they would not have detailed
results until an auditing firm analyzes the trading data next month.
"There probably will be some problems that come out of these tests
for some of the smaller firms that haven't spent as much time fixing
their systems," said Arthur L. Thomas, a Merrill senior vice president
who is overseeing the testing efforts. "But we're expecting them to be
minor and isolated."
The securities firms decided to begin their tests by simulating Dec.
29 because transactions executed that day will be settled on Jan. 3,
the first day of trading in the new year. The tests will continue on
Saturdays until April 24. All told, the industry plans to conduct
about 170,000 mock trades.
Other industry groups have conducted--or are plbarked yesterday on the first stage of a seven-week program to
test their ability to trade stocks and other securities in the new
millennium. The test is being closely watched by technology analysts
because the securities industryry has long been viewed as a leader in
addressing the Y2K issue and any problem could presage dithe group reported.
"We remain confident that dial tone will be available on January 1st,"
said Gene Chiappetta, the forum's chairman.
The North America Electric Reliability Council plans to conduct an
industry-wide test next month that will simulate a partial loss of
computer systems and another in September that will simulate the
rollover from Dec. 31 to Jan. 1.
Some industry consultants have expressed worries that conducting
broad tests late in the year will give companies little time to fix
the problems they uncover, but they say they are encouraged by the
pace of individual efforts in places like Peach Bottom.
"It's good that these problems are happening now," said David
Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer with the Union of Concerned
Scientists. "You don't want this to occur on Dec. 31."
At Peach Bottom, the problem began just after lunch on Feb. 8,
when a group of technicians tested a computer called the "Rodworth
Minimizer." The unit, which operates when the reactor is at low
power, analyzes the position of "control rods" in the core and tells
engineers which ones can--and cannot--be removed to balance
power distribution.
To simulate Jan. 1, the technicians had intended to connect the
Rodworth to another computer that would serve as a clock. But
instead of connecting the unit to the external clock, a programmer
inadvertently reset the date on the backup and primary operations
monitoring systems, which are not yet Y2K compliant, said Joseph
Clepp, an information systems manager at Peco Energy Co., the
Philadelphia-based utility that runs Peach Bottom.
As soon as the date was reset, the screens in the control room went
blank.
"There was no panic, but there was a lot of concern," said Jim
Kovalchick, a shift supervisor who was in the control room during
the outage. "We don't like unusual things, and here we had the high
sensitivity of a system going down."
After a discussion in which "we tried our best to be thoughtful about
the situation we were in," Clepp's team decided to restore the
operations system in a piecemeal fashion, testing each part as they
went along. "We didn't want to bring up the system only to have it
crash again," he said.
The whole task took seven hours.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which said the Peach Bottom
incident was the first Y2K problem at a nuclear plant, appeared
sympathetic to Clepp's travails. "With computer software, it's hard to
anticipate all the difficulties you can run into," said Jared S.
Wermiel, chief of the NRC's reactor systems branch. "And too often,
it's what you haven't thought of that comes back to bite you."
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