Wednesday September 8 11:51 AM ET

Y2K Global Picture To Unfold On Internet By Jim Wolf

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - At midnight on New Year's Eve in New Zealand, an extraordinary U.N.-backed emergency watch will kick off on the Internet to keep tabs on how the world is faring as it enters the year 2000.

Greenwich Mean Time will be 13 hours behind, the U.S. East Coast 17 hours. That lag, the system's planners say, could help others deal with any Y2K-related failures that pop up in New Zealand, the first industrialized country to roll into the new millennium.

The real-time, comprehensive Web-based view of the so-called Y2K glitch, and any havoc it may be wreaking on essential services anywhere, is the work of a World Bank-funded outfit known as the International Y2K Cooperation Center.

Using a standardized reporting format, the center plans to collect data from 170 or more national Y2K coordinators. Its Web site, http://www.iy2kcc.org, will flash color-coded reports on everything from energy and communications to financial and government services and air, land and sea transport.

Anyone with access to the Internet will be able to monitor, country-by-country, the status of the technology-challenging date change -- assuming the Internet itself does not go haywire. One goal is to prevent panic and rumor mongering

The Y2K problem stems from an old programming trick of using two digits to represent years, like 99 for 1999. Unless fixed, computers may read 00 as 1900, not 2000. That could trip critical systems and boggle gizmos with embedded timing devices such as elevators, medical equipment and traffic lights.

MINIMIZING DISRUPTION TO WORLD ECONOMY

The Washington-based center's stated mission is to minimize disruption to the world economies and societies. One key approach has been to coax out as much disclosure of Y2K readiness information as possible.

``In the absence of information, markets will assume the worst,'' Bruce McConnell, the center's director, said in an interview in a rented, fifth-floor office that could be considered ground zero for international Y2K mission control.

``We don't know whether this is going to be a '1' on the Richter scale or a '7,''' he added. ``What's particularly challenging about it is that whatever happens is likely to happen a lot of places at once.''

The center, which operates on a $1 million budget and was set up under United Nations auspices in February, has been stitching together regional discussions to deal with cross-border issues, swap data and prepare contingency plans.

The emphasis is on national ``self-reliance'' in dealing with any disruptions, said McConnell, who is on loan from the White House Office of Management and Budget, where he served as chief of information policy and technology.

``The Y2K emergency, if there is one, will be widespread and simultaneous,'' he said in written testimony last month to a U.S. Senate special panel on the Y2K problem. ``Normal bilateral and multilateral assistance programs may be highly stressed in this environment

One plan in the works is to set up ``help desks,'' primarily on a regional basis. Australia and Japan, for instance, have identified electricity-generating experts who could talk others through any fixes if they prove necessary during the rollover.

GLOBAL EARLY-WARNING STATION

New Zealanders seem to like the idea of being a kind of global early-warning station. They already gave the world one warning -- had anyone been watching -- when the failure to account for the 1996 leap year caused computers to shut down at their Comalco aluminum smelter.

``Two hours later, an identical plant in Hobart, Australia, experienced the exact same failure,'' said Clare Pinder, director of New Zealand's Y2K Readiness Commission. ``This time, we're going to have the eyes of the world focused on us,'' she said in a telephone interview from Wellington.

As the canary in the Y2K coal mine, New Zealand is working to head off the danger that its telecommunications circuits could be swamped by calls from those seeking word on how the date change went.

``We're all working together to make sure that we're not put at risk by being first,'' Pinder said. She said the International Y2K center, for instance, would reroute traffic from the New Zealand Web page (http://www.y2k.govt.nz) to sites that ``mirror'' it on servers in the United States and Europe.

But McConnell acknowledged that whatever early warnings it may give, New Zealand is probably not the best indicator of Y2K trouble in the making.

``If there are problems in New Zealand, then there are probably going to be problems elsewhere,'' he said. ``If there are no problems in New Zealand, that doesn't necessarily mean that of some of the less-prepared countries will not have problems.''

-- Roger Delano (roger@netdex.com), September 08, 1999