US Warns 'Far Too Early To Declare Victory'

By Jim Wolf

LINK

1-1-2000

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States said Friday it was too early to declare complete victory over the 2000 computer glitch, even as the new century dawned with few reported technical hitches or glitches in much of the world.

Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater reported a smooth transition for U.S. aviation, railroads, maritime traffic and pipeline systems after midnight Greenwich Mean Time, the standard on which transportation operates.

Electric industry officials said a few confused clocks were the only problems reported in the North American electricity grid.

``Three clocks timed to run on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) had a problem...but this had no effect on power supply or power operations,'' said Jerry Cauley, a spokesman for the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC).

U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said nuclear facilities in Russia and the rest of the world had successfully crossed into the new year with no reported computer glitches.

``So far, it's been a good Y2K day for the world...but it's far too early to declare victory,'' Richardson said.

With the century rollover still a few hours away for the U.S. East Coast, the Clinton administration said fallout from the so-called Y2K glitch -- or lack thereof -- would not be fully known until next week.

``By sometime on Tuesday, we'll have a pretty good idea of where we are in the United States,'' John Koskinen, President Clinton's top Y2K trouble-shooter, told reporters.

He said it would take an extra day or two after that ''before we can start to close the books on Y2K for the world.''

Of continuing concern were possible hidden Y2K glitches that could foul up management systems and gradually erode performance as businesses reopen next week, officials said.

As soon as Japan and its neighbors reported all systems up and running after midnight in their time zones, Koskinen defended the vast sums spent for fear of the potential Jan. 1 pitfall.

``I think one of the questions you've begun to see surface a little around the edges is, 'well, has this all been hype'?'' Koskinen said at a Friday morning briefing.

The answer, he said, is no. Koskinen -- a presidential assistant who heads the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion -- repeated his oft-stated view that preparing for the 2000 technology challenge was ``the biggest management challenge the world has had in 50 years.''

``And to the extent that we see the results of a phenomenal amount of effort by individuals and the expenditure of a substantial amount of resources resulting in a positive result, I think that we should not underestimate the nature of the problem that was originally there,'' he said.

Koskinen spoke at a $50 million command center set up by the White House to gather Y2K updates from industry, state, local and foreign governments.

The Commerce Department has estimated the United States alone will spend as much as $100 billion to fix the Y2K glitch, including more than $8 billion by the federal government.

With the date change just hours away, one of the only confirmed Y2K-related glitches temporarily pulled the plug on about 150 slot machines at horse racing tracks in the state of Delaware.

The State Department, citing updates from U.S. embassies, U.S.-based multinational companies and international organizations, reported that automated systems were going gently into the good night worldwide.

At Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado, U.S. and Russian military experts, sitting side by side, marked the new year's arrival in Moscow without incident, lessening fears a Y2K computer bug might trigger a nuclear nightmare.

``As you can see, the light is on in Moscow. The Y2K problem is not a problem,'' Russian Col. Sergey Kaplin said moments after the New Year rolled over in Moscow.

The joint missile-watching exercise was devised by the Pentagon to make sure that no computer glitch would somehow drive the old Cold War rivals toward a millennial misunderstanding.

Thomas Pickering, the No. 3 State Department official, defended the U.S. decision to lean heavily on other nations -- for instance by issuing special Y2K travel advisories -- to find, fix and test billions of lines of their computer code.

``And indeed we have seen some impact of that already in what's been happening'' as 2000 rolls in without known major problems, he said.

Koskinen and the top U.S. aviation official, Jane Garvey, boarded separate commercial flights Friday evening to demonstrate confidence in U.S. air traffic control.

Garvey, who heads the Federal Aviation Administration, reported to President Clinton: ``Aviation has reached the year 2000 and I am pleased to report ... that the nation's air space system is up and running safely and efficiently.''

The Y2K problem stems from a storage-saving convention of dropping the first two numbers in the dates of years. Left uncorrected, computers might have misinterpreted ``00'' as 1900, not 2000, and generated bad data or shut down.

In a high-tech publicity stunt, the U.S. nuclear submarine Topeka straddled the International Dateline at the equator to give its crew a unique stroll between time zones, days, months, years, centuries, millennia, seasons and hemispheres.

[ENDS]

-- John Whitley (jwhitley@inforamp.net), January 01, 2000

Answers

All this time, and the media still cannot figure out when the next century/millennium will start [January 1, 2001). Seems the navy couldn't do the math either.

-- Les Largent (largent@voyager.net), January 10, 2000.