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To: Bobby Yellin who wrote (14610)	7/18/1998 5:43:00 PM
From: John Mansfield	Respond to of 116758

OT - 'fedinfo@halifax.com wrote: > > IG finds new date code threat > > More than 70 percent of the world's oil reserves could be at risk if the U.S. > Central Command doesn't fix its year 2000 problem, the Defense Department > inspector general has reported. > > The IG report, U.S. Central Command Year 2000 Issues, found that although > CENTCOM has made progress on its year 2000 work, its job is far from over. > CENTCOM, one of DOD's nine unified commands, oversees oil operations in 20 > countries in the Middle East, Southwest Asia, Northeast Africa and the Arabian > Gulf. > > "Unless the U.S. Central Command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the services and > Defense agencies make further progress, U.S. Central Command faces a high risk > that year 2000-related disruptions will impair its mission capabilities," the > report said. That would make it more difficult for the command to protect oil > reserves in the region, the report said. > ================ > > Ooops. More good news that makes us even more confident of a successful > remediation. NOT > > This report was very carefully worded to not give exact statistics of how bad the Central Command's efforts have been. No grade was assigned. But I think the message is in between the lines and this is not just some exagerated warning. No oil, no army/air force/navy, no running around town in our cars, no fuel for electric utilities, no food distribution. Hmmmm. Me thinks that in mid-1998 (see, I was a good boy and wrote a four digit date) we should be getting Happy Face about the CC, not dire warnings. Dire warnings at this stage spell only trouble. This is one of the big stories to follow. No oil, no nuthin' as we presently know it. - pl ____ Subject: Re: IG finds new date code threat Date: Thu, 16 Jul 1998 23:18:09 -0400 From: paul leblanc <pleblan9NOSPAM@pop3.idt.net> Organization: IDT (Best News In The World) Newsgroups: comp.software.year-2000 References:

To: Bobby Yellin who wrote (14610)	7/18/1998 6:00:00 PM
From: John Mansfield	Respond to of 116758

OT - INTERESTING - Worrysome news from Roleigh Martin I post this with allowance of Roleigh Martin, who emailed this to me. John ________________________ ' From roleigh.martin-1@tc.umn.edu Wed Jul 15 18:03:08 1998 .... 'FYI -- My summary of yesterday. Please correct if you know of any errors. ===================================================================== I attended the Minnesota Joint House-Senate Hearing yesterday and the co-chair, Rep. Bill Hilty, graciously had his assistant keep a copy of all of the prepared testimony (except for that of the utility company, Alliant which is a new utility created out of a merger of utilities in Wisc., Iowa, and Southern Minnesota--not enough of Alliant's testimony was distributed). Most interesting of the testimony for United's Minnesota operations purposes is that of the testimony of the Minn. Dept. of Public Service. After my repeated email suggestions that the Dept. perform a survey, and after Rep. Hilty joined in with the pressure, they mailed out a survey to 320 Minnesota utilities (electric, natural gas, petroleum, and telephone companies) dated April 27, 1998. The preliminary results are as follows. They will be formally posted to the Minn. Dept. of Public Service web site at the end of this month or early next month. (I have the names of the organizations that responded and did not respond--if you can tell me who are the utilities for our non-Twin-City Minnesota operations, I'll let you know if they responded--eg, such as Duluth, International Falls. Also if you want the entire list of those who responded and those who did not, as well as the full questionnaire and cover letter, I can make a copy of that for you. -- please provide your mailing route number if you request this.) 320 telephone, natural gas, electric and petroleum companies in MN queried 182 number of those queried who responded two months after mailout (midway after mailout a followup letter was mailed to increase responses) Of those responding, these answered: Percent Number Percent of all Queried 57.00% 103.74 32.42% Yes to "Has your organization established a Year 2000 project team" 58.00% 105.56 32.99% Yes to "Has your oganization identified a Year 2000 project manager" 38.00% 69.16 21.61% Yes to "Has your organization developed a detailed Year 2000 plan" 49.00% 89.18 27.87% Yes to "Does your organization's Year 2000 plan include a separate test for (e.g., computer, piece of equipment, etc.) that you believe may be subject to a Year 2000 problem Examples of those who did not respond (even after the second =================== mailing--and the mailing was a joint venture of the Minnesota Dept. of Public Service and the State of Minnesota Public Utilities Commission). TELEPHONE COMPANIES WHO DID NOT RESPOND (SELECT EXAMPLES OF ABOUT 44 WHO DID NOT RESPOND) AT&T U.S. Link, Inc. Hutchinson Telephone Company Metro Fiber Systems of Mpls/St.Paul Northland Telephone Company Redwood County Telephone Company Twin-Valley Ulen Telephone Company West Central Telephone Company Redwood County Telephone Company Worldcom Network Services Inc ELECTRIC COMPANIES WHO DID NOT RESPOND (SELECT EXAMPLES OF ABOUT 87 WHO DID NOT RESPOND) Chaska Water and Light Dept Elk River Municipal Utilities Hutchinson Utilties Commission - Electric Minnesota Valley Cooperative Mountain Lake Municipal Municipal Utilities MN Valley Electric Cooperative New Ulm Public Utilities Commission North St. Paul Utility Dept. Owatonna Municipal Public Utilities Redwood Electric Cooperative Rochester Public Utilities Commission Tri-County Electric Cooperative Tyler Municcipal Light and Power Wright Hennepin Cooperative Electric Association GAS COMPANIES WHO DID NOT RESPOND (OF ABOUT 12 WHO DID NOT RESPOND) Hibbing Public Utilities - Gas New Ulm Public Utilities - Gas Owatonna Municipal Public UTilities - Gas Western Gas Utilities Northwest Natural Gas PIPELINES/OTHER COMPANIES WHO DID NOT RESPOND (full list -- although Koch did testify at the May 18 hearing) Murphy Oil USA Marathon/Ashland Oil Koch Refining Company AMOCO Mid America Pipeline Company More interesting tidbits: * Alliant reported about 170,000 embedded systems they are concerned with and investigating and of these about 3 percent are found to be noncompliant * The League of Minnesota Cities spoke and their report is very alarming -- the cities are very concerned with utmost concerns on how they are going to fund the upgrades and avoid litigation; they asked the legislature for funding and litigation relief that would require an emergency session of the legislature to help them in time. You might want to ask me for a copy of their testimony -- I have it. (Provide your mailing route number if you do request it.) * NSP says they will have at a minimum one month spare supply of coal, perhaps more on hand. They burn about 4 trainloads of coal a day. NSP says they should be at the stage of placing all their replacement orders within another month -- this will be a a major milestone in embedded systems remediation for NSP and any other utility who gets to this point in their project -- prior to doing this, nobody can say whether one is on schedule or not, because the turn-around-time with vendors will differ vendor to vendor and because of the following reason--my most pressing concern about this issue is this next paragraph. I asked NSP project manager, MAPP (Mid-Continent Power Pool), and Minnesota Power, and although they did not have precise data, they felt I was pretty much on the mark using a typical 15 year lifespan for typical equipment that has to be upgraded for Y2K reasons (the typical lifespan if Y2K was not an issue). Normal market supply and demand forces would therefore indicate that the servicing vendors/engineering firms are setup to replace 1/15th of the industry in any one year. However, 100% of the industry will be needing to do this upgrade in about an 18 month timespan, due to almost all utilities are not yet in the order phase or are just getting around to it of their Y2K project. Now with working double shift, overtime, and hiring extra help, perhaps the industry could handle threefold their normal load (an optimistic hope--because normal non-y2k repairs/replacements can't stop in the meantime due to normal wear and tear and storm damages), and over an 18 month window, this would mean that 1/3rd of the industry could be serviced in an optimistic best-case situation. This means that 2/3rds of the industry will have to face the Year 2000 using manual workarounds or kludges to deal with the problems in their equipment. The engineer from MAPP told me that my assessment made sense and that is why, he felt, that NERC -- the North American Reliability Council is advocating that utilities are Y2K-Ready for the Year 2000. Y2K-Ready in this context means that the equipment will not be year 2000 compliant except with manual workarounds and kludges. Then the question becomes -- can two/thirds of the industry find the extra help and will they do the proper manual work around training so that the troubleshooting and workarounds that have to be done in January 2000 adequately handle the job -- and we're talking about similar situations in all the core infrastructures here. Bottom line: none of the utilities stated they had placed all of their orders yet for replacement equipment -- none of them are at that stage yet. Alliant mentioned they had approached some of their suppliers only to be told by some of them "go away." They were quite concerned about the order problem. Rep. Bill Hilty, the co-chair, asked this question of each utility. Only 3-4 utilities testified (Alliant, Minnesota Power, NSP--I forget whether UPA testified or not, the meeting was cut short although it lasted 1.5 hours longer than planned--not everyone got to testify). It is a concern about all utilities until they at least get to the order placement phase of their project--none of them are there yet. It is a real concern about those utilities who did not respond and about those utilities who did respond who do not have a detailed Y2K plan (which means there is a real concern about 79% of the utilities in Minnesota!). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Roleigh Martin marti124@tc.umn.edu (home email) ourworld.compuserve.com (A Web Site that focuses on Y2k threat to Utilities & more!) ....