Utilities Say They’re Ready for New Year

When the new millennium arrives, count on the lights to shine and the water to run. At the stroke of midnight, the microwave will still cook, household heaters will warm, TVs will continue their glow, banks will have money and you should be able to use the phone to call friends or relatives.

In all respects, the utilities that power and comfort the American lifestyle should be working just as efficiently at the dawning moments of 2000 as they did at the conclusion of 1999.

That is the ringing message of reassurance that Ventura County’s utility providers are offering to the public as the new year rapidly approaches.

“We are not expecting any disruptions related to Y2K,” Keith R. Wilcox, an information technology manager for Southern California Edison Co., told the media and local emergency officials at a briefing in Ventura on Tuesday. “We’ve done everything we can to make sure the power stays on.”

But it is a promise that comes without a guarantee.

Indeed, representatives for Southern California utility companies say they cannot guarantee that there will be no disruptions in service related to Jan. 1 computer glitches. While they are confident in their companies’ ability to provide uninterrupted service, they are less sanguine about other major pillars of infrastructure.

For example, water and phone companies believe that they can keep the service flowing, but they cannot guarantee that the electric company will provide them the juice they need to power machines. Conversely, Edison officials assure that the power will be available, but cannot swear that their customers, including water treatment plants, banks and phone companies, will be ready.

“No one can give a 100% guarantee, but we’ve done everything that is humanly possible to see that there are no Y2K problems,’ said Tom Murnane, spokesman for Southern California Gas Co.

Just in case fail-safe measures fail, utility companies this week are putting finishing touches on contingency plans for the upcoming holiday weekend. Extra work crews and customer service representatives are scheduled to be on duty. Those employees who aren’t pulling shifts are ordered to be on standby.

Edison, for example, plans to double its weekend staff to 1,000 employees for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, Wilcox said. The Gas Co. has 70 extra employees on duty to respond to potential problems in Southern California and has set up a toll-free number, (877) 877-2967, and a Web page, www.socalgas.com, that people can consult after noon New Year’s Eve for information about possible service disruptions.

Steve Wilson, water superintendent for Ventura, said computers run 32 booster pumps, 24 treated water reservoirs and three treatment plants to keep water flowing to 29,000 households in the city.

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Ventura spent $464,000 to make the system Y2K ready, but just to be safe, Wilson said he is filling all the reservoirs to capacity this week to ensure that the city has plenty of water.

Edison plans to double its available electrical power reserve to 14% and limit power transfers out of state for the holiday weekend, Wilcox said. Reserve electricity is produced by keeping power plants operating at higher than normal production and keeping other plants on standby status, he said.

Similarly, the Gas Co. has enough natural gas in reserve to supply Southern California homes and businesses for three weeks in the event that supplies are disrupted, an improbable scenario, Murnane said.

Steve Voelker, regional chairman for the California Bankers Assn. and president of Santa Clara Valley Bank in Santa Paula, said most banks will have extra funds on hand, as they typically do for long holiday weekends. So far, there have been no runs by people trying to withdraw money, he said.

“We’d already see signs. We haven’t seen it,” he said.

They have taken precautions, but utility officials said they do not think that they will be necessary. They envision a lot of extra personnel working through a largely uneventful weekend.

“We expect a nice, quiet evening,” said Fred Trueblood, Ventura County regional manager for Edison.

Why? Officials cite several advantages that give utilities an upper hand in managing potential Y2K upsets.

For starters, they have been actively working on Y2K readiness for four years. During that period, Edison officials checked 65,000 computer chips at generating and relay stations, and 375,000 chips at meters. Fewer than 1% had date-specific information that made them vulnerable to Y2K and they were replaced, Wilcox said.

Also, the new millennium will arrive in most of the world before it reaches California, giving government and business officials here as much as a 20-hour head start to anticipate problems.

The state Office of Emergency Services, under a project called Follow the Sun, will spend Friday watching the New Year dawn across the rest of the globe and adjusting strategies to ensure a smooth transition for California.

And the arrival of the New Year on the weekend, when demand for water and power is lower, should help. For example, weekend electrical demand in Southern California typically requires 8,000 megawatts of power, about one-third less than on weekdays, Wilcox said.

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Indeed, with so much time to prepare, utility officials say they are in a much better position to ride out the new millennium than they are when disasters, including earthquakes, wildfires and windstorms, strike the region.

“We’re ready for Y2K,” said Steve Getzug, spokesman for Pacific Bell, which uses 200,000 access lines to provide telephone service to residents in Ventura, Ojai, Moorpark, Simi Valley, Fillmore and Piru.

“We’ve been preparing for it for the past four years. All our network switches in Ventura County and the entire network in California have been upgraded and all our internal systems have been checked and rechecked. Jan. 1 is going to be just like any other day.”

The wild card that worries officials, however, is human error. A community could lose power if a drunken driver crashes into a power pole or revelers shoot up transformers. Someone installing a swimming pool and severing a gas line could cause temporary interruptions of service.

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If people attribute such problems to Y2K, officials fear a public panic.

“Our real challenge and our real worry is rumors and misinformation,” Trueblood said. “We have a concern when something happens; what will people attribute it to?”

To minimize those problems, officials are urging people not to take actions that can overload the system. Excessive phone use, for example, is one concern.

Jon Davies, spokesman for GTE, urges people to avoid checking the phone around midnight Jan. 1. A sudden rush by 5.5 million GTE customers in California could overload the system, a phenomenon common on Mother’s Day and after earthquakes.

“We are confident there will be no Y2K-related problems with our network, but don’t pick up the phone just to see if it works,” Davies said. “It will create too big a rush of calls.

“This is not Y2K-related. We’ve tested everything, but there are eventualities that we can’t foresee that might lead to some minor glitches.”