Only 37% of 911 Centers Are Y2K-Ready, U.S. Panel Says

Only 37% of the nation’s 911 emergency call centers are ready for the Y2K computer challenge that arrives with the new year, according to the President’s Council on the Year 2000 Conversion.

John A. Koskinen, who chairs the council, said Thursday that 911 computer failures could force local emergency personnel to abandon their automated locator systems and use backup manual dispatch methods, which could slow response time.

“A large number of local governments have done a wonderful job,” he said. “We are concerned about what is unfortunately a larger minority than we would like to see.”

The so-called millennium computer bug relates to the shorthand most computers use to express the month, day and year of an event. Time-sensitive dispatch systems that misread 2000 for 1900 or confuse an address will be of little help for police, fire and medical personnel in emergencies.

“If we don’t know where they are, we can’t find them and we can’t help them,” said Bob Miller of the Columbus, Ohio-based National Emergency Number Assn., which represents 911 centers.

The problem is particularly acute in medium-size communities that are big enough to have automated 911 systems but not large enough to have the personnel to upgrade them, according to the council.

Responding to a survey earlier this summer, only 37% of the 2,000 local 911 centers questioned were ready as of June. However, most others said that they expected to be ready by the end of the year.

California officials insisted, however, that the state’s 438 emergency 911 centers will be Y2K compliant well before year’s end.

“This is priority No. 1,” said Elias S. Cortez, chief information officer for the state Department of Information Technology, the lead agency for Y2K readiness. “The [telephone] networks that support 911 are 100% compliant. And we’ve done rigorous end-to-end testing.”

Mark Adams, executive director of the National Emergency Number Assn., agrees that California is “a model state” for Y2K compliance.

Surveying the nation’s 4,300 major 911 centers, Adams said that he thinks the Y2K threat is not in equipment failure but in caller overload.

“I don’t think we’re concerned about the 911 equipment not working,” he said. “We’re concerned about the volume of calls . . . , people just jamming the lines.”

Many municipalities are urging residents to call 911 on New Year’s Day only in real emergencies. Others are advising residents to call fire, police or ambulance services directly.

With fewer than 150 days left before the new year, the latest report card by the president’s council was largely optimistic. Banks, utilities and air traffic systems have all made significant progress in getting ready for the deadline, the report said.

“There is now increasing confidence and people should be comforted that the basic infrastructure of the country will hold,” said Koskinen.

He added: “It’s comforting to know we’re not going to have a national catastrophe in any of these major areas, but, ultimately, tell me about my local government, my power company, my water company.” And, he might have added, local schools.

Koskinen said the newest concern is that educational institutions--elementary and secondary schools and community and some four-year colleges--are lagging in addressing the 2000 computer glitch.

Only 28% of more than 3,500 educational agencies surveyed indicated that their systems are Y2K compliant.

“That’s a large number of institutions to focus on completion of their work in the five months we have remaining,” Koskinen said.

Of roughly 2,100 post-secondary educational institutions responding to a recent Y2K survey, 40% projected that they still would not be compliant by Oct. 1.

Particularly disturbing, he added, is that one-third of educational institutions have not even finished assessing what they need to do to avoid problems.

Institutions that ignore the computer glitch could face myriad problems. For example, computers that hold student records and track their loans and grants could malfunction. In institutions that have buildings with computer systems, heating and security systems could go down.

Much work also remains to be done at small health-care facilities and in doctors’ offices, according to the report. Patient records and billing systems in older computers, in particular, could be vulnerable.

However, the 79-page report, the council’s third of its quarterly report cards, was full of upbeat accounts of how the federal government and various sectors of the economy are well on the way to being ready to meet the computer challenge.

For instance, as of last month, the largest local and long-distance telephone carriers were 98% compliant, and major U.S. and Canadian airlines had completed 95% of their fixes. As of Monday, the federal bank, thrift and credit union regulators announced that 99% of federally insured financial institutions have finished testing their most important systems.

But Kazim Isfahani, Year 2000 analyst for the Giga Information Group, a research and advisory group based in Cambridge, Mass., warned that the government’s rosy assessments could give people a false sense of security.

“What we need from the government is more factual information--we don’t need a hunky-dory speech about how everything is going to be fine,” said Isfahani.

“It’s definitely not time for a sigh of relief. There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done.”