State Aims to Distinguish Y2K Glitches From Everyday Snafus

Pick a day, any day. In California, disaster is bound to strike.

With its crowded conditions, slide-prone slopes and restless tectonic plates, the Golden State is ever imperiled by calamity, from killer quakes to medflies, floods, wildfires--even volcanic eruptions. Beyond that, there’s the daily quota of toxic spills, freeway pileups and airplane crashes.

Now comes the dreaded millennium bug, and with it the potential for still more mayhem. Which begs the question: Amid the constant chaos of California, how will we know if New Year’s Day disasters are Y2K-related?

“California is the Disneyland of disasters,” said Dallas Jones, chief of emergency services for the state. Distinguishing the ordinary from the extraordinary as 2000 dawns “will be a real challenge.”

Making that distinction is crucial, officials say, to head off panic. And it will help emergency crews gauge whether a Jan. 1 problem is run-of-the-mill or a Y2K glitch that foretells a crisis.

A Reminder of How Bad Things Are

Toward that end, government officials are gathering baseline information detailing the woes that typically plague our everyday lives. Their reports cover everything from the failure rate of ATMs to statistics on railroad accidents, missing boats, pipeline failures and power outages.

“If we watched the world tomorrow as closely as we will watch Jan. 1, we’d see a whole set of things not working,” said John A. Koskinen, President Clinton’s Y2K advisor. Knowing ahead of time what those things are will provide a context for millennium snafus and help the public “interpret events appropriately.”

Although laudable, it may be one of the most curious public awareness campaigns ever: Remind people how bad things are all the time so they don’t freak out if bad things happen New Year’s Day.

Psychologists applaud the government’s concern about public anxiety, but predict that this particular exercise may be futile. After a year’s worth of news stories and other bulletins about the threat posed by the Y2K gremlin, people are primed to blame it for every conceivable problem they encounter around Jan. 1.

“It’s all you see in the media. It’s in the comic strips; it’s everywhere,” said Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at Cal State Dominguez Hills who studies public attitudes toward technology. “The public consciousness is so tuned in to Y2K that officials who try to convince us that a certain problem is unrelated” simply won’t sound credible.

Despite the potential skepticism, officials are pressing on. In Washington earlier this month, Clinton’s Y2K czar released an intriguing catalog of various snafus that gum up daily life.

A banking survey showed that 1% to 2% of the nation’s 227,000 ATM machines either malfunction or run out of cash on any given day. About 10% of credit transactions routinely fail because of equipment breakdowns or user errors. And on a bad day, 1% of all traffic lights turn to flashing.

Transportation Woes Common

Stumbles are common in air and rail transportation as well. An average of 424 commercial flights have been delayed 15 minutes or more on the last five New Year’s Days, and there are about four train accidents annually on Jan. 1.

Water, sewer, oil and natural gas delivery systems aren’t foolproof either. Southern California got a big reminder of that on Dec. 13, when a 69-inch Metropolitan Water District line ruptured in Irvine, affecting service to 700,000 residents in southern Orange County.

As for power outages, the biggest Y2K worry, U.S. customers typically lose electricity for 13 hours each year, not including failures caused by major storms.

“And there are always outages on New Year’s Eve,” said John Castagna of the Edison Electric Institute, a trade association in Washington, D.C. The culprit? Vandals who fire guns at transformers and drunk drivers who smash into power poles.

“Unless we see the smashed car and the pole lying in your frontyard 1/8on New Year’s 3/8, it will take a little time” to figure out whether the Y2K bug or something more ordinary bears the blame, Castagna said. But utilities will have oodles of extra staff on hand to do just that.

On the local level, the city of Los Angeles has gathered some baseline data of its own, although its effort was far less comprehensive than that undertaken by the White House.

Statistics show that the city water system has six to nine pipe leaks and repairs daily, and that two or three fire hydrants are damaged each day. On average, Los Angeles power systems experience 10 outages daily, and more during storms.

Although it wasn’t mentioned in the city’s report, a power surge at Los Angeles City Hall last May knocked out a third of the building’s electricity, trapping people in elevators for nearly an hour and a half. Bob Canfield, emergency preparedness specialist for Los Angeles, said all of this proves that we don’t need the Y2K bug to send things haywire.

“The point is,” Canfield said, “every department, every business, has something that goes wrong every day. I have computer problems almost every day and threaten to shoot it or throw it out the window. But it has nothing to do with Y2K.

“People need to keep all of this in perspective and not get panicky if the lights happen to go out.”

For California--victim of an endlessly diverse string of disasters, natural and not--this perspective would seem particularly vital. Though the last few years have been relatively calm--except for a 1998 winter freeze that destroyed the navel orange crop and threw thousands of pickers out of work--calm is hardly the norm.

In his first three years in office, former Gov. Pete Wilson issued 27 declarations of emergency covering 56 of the state’s 58 counties. “I want to thank you for all the help you gave me to become governor,” Wilson used to tell supporters, “and I want you to know that I’ve almost forgiven you.”

Beyond the well-known toll of fires, quakes, riots, droughts, insect invasions and mudslides, California has suffered through a tsunami that killed 12 people in Crescent City, a dam break in Baldwin Hills and a chemical spill from a rail car that wiped out the entire ecosystem on the upper Sacramento River. For a while in the early 1990s, the state was averaging a presidential disaster declaration every four months.

Sometimes, trouble comes calling on New Year’s Day. During the opening hours of 1997, for example, rains, heavy runoff and levee failures spawned the so-called New Year’s Day Flood. By the time the waters subsided, eight people were dead and the damage had soared to $1.8 billion.

The disaster command post for California is the state Office of Emergency Services Warning Center, housed in an old Army barracks south of the state Capitol. There, dispatchers take phone calls at a horseshoe-shaped desk where they also can monitor weather satellites, earthquake maps, police radios and CNN. Nearby, two hotlines connect the center to the state’s nuclear power plants: San Onofre and Diablo Canyon.

Denise Orsel, a dispatcher on duty on a recent afternoon, said a typical day involves calls on everything from hazardous waste spills to missing planes, lost hikers, winter storm warnings, even the occasional suicide attempt. Her job is to record the emergency in a daily log and, if needed, get help--be it a dog team to aid with a missing person search or the Civil Air Patrol crew needed to hunt for an overdue aircraft.

Throughout the New Year’s weekend, the center will be on high alert, with extra staff on hand to take reports that ultimately will be available to the public on a Web site. Officials say they will distinguish as quickly as possible whether a particular problem is caused by the Y2K bug, but acknowledge that a time lag is inevitable.

“The first priority will be dealing with the disruption, whatever that may be,” said David Lema, Gov. Gray Davis’ Y2K advisor. “After that, we’ll try to determine if it was normal happenstance or related to Y2K.”

Everyday Snafus

Power: Each year, U.S. customers lose power for a total of 13 hours, not including outages caused by major storms.

Automated teller machines: One to two percent of the nation’s 227,000 ATMs are down or out of cash at any given time.

Credit cards: Ten percent of all credit transactions fail because of equipment malfunctions or user errors.

911: Jammed lines, switch failures and other equipment problems cause a disruption in service each week.

Pipelines: Pipelines carrying natural gas or other hazardous materials failed an average of 18 times between Dec. 31 and Jan. 4 during the last three years.

Lost boats: An average of 57 search-and-rescue missions are launched in December and January by the Coast Guard, many due to the failure of navigational devices.

Airplanes: There were 424 commercial flights delayed 15 minutes or more on the last five New Year’s Days.

Railroads: More than four train accidents occur annually on New Year’s Day.

Source: President Clinton’s Council on Year 2000 Conversion