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Some Water & Sewer Plants May Not Be Y2K Compliant
Thabenksta writes "According to a Reuters News Article, over half of the United States' water treatment plants may not be y2k ready. This may result in backed up sewers, and undertreated water."
What planet are you from? Small towns don't have pubic water and sewer? Each house has its own private water and waste facilities!!?? What kind of crack have you been smoking the last, oh say 50 years or so?
Um, where do you think I'm getting the well water from? I have a load of 4L bottles that I send to a friend's place, which is about a 15 minute drive from where I live, in the capital city of Newfoundland. Many of my relatives in Ontario chose to dig wells, too. Basically, the water doesn't have so much Cl in it, which is a good thing.
Those "rural water coops" are awful. The water quality is much worse than even city water. I'd rather *not* have to boil my water after it comes out to avoid "beaver fever," thank you very much.
I agree that this probably isn't the right measure, as there's reasonably more to money supply than this.
This is closer to the truth than claims about M0.
But. I prefer another scenario...
There will also be...
These amounts unambiguously increase the money supply regardless of which variation you prefer...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Why is the government involved in regulating water, anyways? If we only opened up water service to the free market, then people would buy water from those companies who are prepared and we never would have had a Y2k problem in the first place!...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Yes. The news article I saw recently (it was an old article, but I think it was linked to from the Jon Katz article here) didn't indicate, as I remember, whether the problem was that a not-Y2K-ready system got confused and dumped raw sewage, or that, when they shut the power off to simulate a power failure, the system got confused and dumped raw sewage - in which case the system
If that's the case, one hopes they've fixed the problem by now - for reasons having nothing to do with Y2K....
I'm also curious whether part of the problem being reported involved, for example, no testing or contingency plans having been completed by June 1999 (as per the article saying
in which case the systems might not actually be broken, or there might not be a need for the contingency plans.
On the other hand, testing doesn't ipso facto guarantee that the systems won't have a problem, so that particular knife cuts both ways; there may well be systems that passed their testing but fail anyway.
(My personal suspicion is that many optimists will be surprised by problems occurring that they didn't expect to happen, and many pessimists will be surprised by problems not occurring that they did expect to happen. I suspect we've evolved not to like uncertainty, and tend to become sure of things even when the evidence is equivocal....)
Hi all, I would like to point out that this warning that is being cited is not new. There were several press articles in the UK computing arena about 6 months ago concerning Millennium compliance problems with UK water treatment and sewage treatment plants. In particular, I live in a large village (Tilehurst) in Reading (very near London). Both Reading and a large chunk of the London area fall under the control of Thames Water for their water and sewage treatment. The Thames Water computer system apparently had a date problem inside the system which controls the release of raw sewage into the sea. The system operates via a cut-off date/time combo, after which it will stop pouring sewage into the sea. Unfortunately, last I heard, the system date will "overflow" to 1900 (or something similar) and will thus never reach the stop time. A word of advice: don't go swimming in the sea anywhere in Britain (or anywhere) very soon after the Millennium, let them clarify the situation first. Surfers beware! :-) Furthermore though, things like this aren't a major problem as one would expect somebody to notice the potentially "damaging" YK2 side-effects like these, and manually interrupt them - hopefully before long term ecological damage is done. disclaimer: I'm not a YK2 nut, I don't expect to be let down by such fundamental services. Most of these stories are excessively overstated and, whilst I would consider their potential implications, I believe that it's the more subtle things that we should "worry" about. E.G. I'm more concerned that the cash machine will have run out of money from all the party goers than that the bank has lost all my money.
http://www.jonmasters.org/
Sorry, couldn't resist. I miss parsed the article header to read `plants that grow in water and sewers'.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Well, that's why I said the crap is broken down.
=)
I don't think many water/sewer systems are totally reliant on computers. This may mean overtime for infrastructure workers, but is not likely to be of interest to the average citizen.
... at least if the planes crash, they will have a nice soft layer of sewage to hit. ;-)
==============================
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Man, talk about a buffer overflow. Gotta go get the plunger now... yeesh....
I used to be confident that most Y2K scenarios were far-fetched little stories created to scare viewers and nab ratings during sweeps.
Now I'm not so sure...
The City of Milwaukee, without telling anyone before hand, installed 12 huge emergency generators in strategic locations around the metro area. Their purpose? To provide emergency power to the sewage overflow pumps, thereby reducing the chance that sewage will back up into your basement if we suffer a prolonged outage. They'll pump the sewage into local streams and rivers... streams and rivers that will be frozen by the 1st.
This came just days after their "We're OK for Y2K" press conference.
My brother-in-law runs a municipal water supply, so I can answer some of your issues based on ym conversations with him and his work schedule.
First off, SOMEONE will be available at midnight new years if something goes wrong -- water is too valuable a resource, and the technicians, as well as other staff, have a regular rotating call schedule (24/7) like any hospital.
Flexible hours are what attract some people to the job, so being on a saturday doesn't mean they have two days off (someone is running the station on a saturday and sunday, too!).
Second, everything has a mechanical override -- again, water is too valuable to trust entirely to automated systems. There are plenty of people who know how to run the override systems.
granted, this is all for a municipality of a few hundred thousand (maybe a million, but less than two) so large cities like NYC will have much more automation dependency...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Ok, first off, setting water and food aside is a good idea no matter where or when you are living. I come from a weird family (ok, flat-out dysfunctional, they're all freaks). But the one thing my mother has tons of is common sense. She has always had a deep freezer, and a back room full of cans. We ate this food - you don't want to keep cans for more than a year or so, so we cycled through them. But they always kept that room etc. full. We had enough food back there to keep us for a good three or four months, just in case. We also had a week's worth of water, which she changed frequently so as to keep it fresh. We lived in a rural area.
:P ).
What did this mean, practically? A lot of work for mom - but when hurricane Diana hit and laid waste to our neighbors' places (we were on a hill, and what neighbors were around in that rural area lived in houses like ours, 200 years old), we were ok. We didn't need the ability to get to the garden or the store, we had enough water, etc. When we had a massive blizzard and were stuck in the house for a week and a half, the only problems we had involved keeping four hyper, annoying, ADD-affected monsters from destroying everything.
Keeping stores is always a good idea (but it does take work and space, and I'm lazy and live in an apartment so I'm not ready for _anything_ right now).
Also, this thing about the sewage and water treatment systems: I have been under the impression that the number of backup systems is downright funny for that sort of thing. Human labor did it at first, without computers, and they never removed the ability for human labor to do it still. So maybe our water bills will be a bit higher (ok, the water bills of those of you who own houses
There's going to be a run on bottled water and canned food anyway, due to the mass hysteria that this date-change has caused in the US. I think I'm more afraid of the crowds in the stores than I am of this sort of thing.
Besides, the 'end of the world' is going to happen via diseases anyway. Now that I have nightmares about - Plague Patrols going on witchhunts, killing anyone who has even bad acne in an effort to keep diseases under control, buildings falling down due to lack of maintenance, people fighting over food because they don't know how to hunt - or don't want to eat diseased rats and pigeons... *shudder* (but that's not based on date anyway, it's based on how-long-humans-keep-fighting).
Bleh.
-Elthia
Industrial systems such as water/sewer systems have two layers:
Accouting, which is the technology that you see when you visit a plant because it is visible -- monitor screens displaying really nifty info on the status of the plant etc.
Control is the layer that actually does all the work. Now these aren't so apparent because usually embedded chips do this sort of work. Totally hardware or at least firmware that has been a fundamental part of the working of the plant since it was built.
That possibly means in the '70s or '80s. Hard to upgrade because of the nature, and to make things worse, most of the people who can fix them are probably not in the business anymore.
Check out http://www.2k-times.com/y2k-a152.htm for more info on embedded chips in general.
See my other comment on something that sounded like this story (except that, if I remember correctly, the sewage was dumped into a park, not into a lake or river); was it a Y2K problem that caused the gate to misbehave, or was it some other problem that showed up because, as part of their testing, they shut power off? (Which means that the problem, as per my other comment, is arguably worse than a Y2K problem, as power can go away for other reasons....)
However, if you mean regulation in the sense of establishing standards and inspecting for compliance, which is to mean what "regulation" means, then that's simple to answer. It's for the same reason as why the government in clean foods, effective drugs, state-licensed physicians or electricians, and aircraft inspections. It's a matter of public safety. Safe food, safe drugs, safe wiring, safe surgery, safe airplanes. And so on and so forth.
And no, you really can't trust the industries to be responsible. Most will, but sometimes mistakes are made, corners are cut, or people are just too greedy. History has shown that you just can't trust all the people all the time. The cost in terms of human life is deemed too high to just let it all slide. And yes, it happens plenty anyway. But without public health and safety regulations, it would be incredibly worse.
And you don't really want the private sector responsible for creating and enforcing the public safety laws. That would be even worse that having the government do it. Much worse, I fear.
[When I read the headline, I was trying to figure out how water lilies could fail at Y2K compliance. Seriously. "Water plants" just invoked the wrong image for me. :-]
"Merry Christmas! Shitter was full"
--Cousin Eddie
I've long felt that the modern sewage system is one of humankind's greatest achievements. Just looking back at the pre-sewage European cities during a plague or cholera outbreak reminds you just how many disgusting things live in our waste. While I'm sure that many major cities (at least in the US) won't be totally affected, I could see where this would be a problem in small towns (like my own) and in foreign countries. It's funny when you stop and think about just how much computers affect our lives. Sewer systems!
Invicta{HOG}
Since the report did not predict which water suppliers may be disrupted by Y2K, the center recommended households store 10 gallons of water per person for the date change, or enough to last 10 days.
Later that day a few other recommendations were added:
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I had heard that a town in Ontario did a Y2K check on their water system and it leaked diesel into the water supply.
The joke was that it improved the water.
I have a feeling that *some* small towns are going to have a lot of trouble if they haven't checked by now (morons, what the fsck do they get paid for?).
Meanwhile, I'm in a larger city and I have quite a stockpile of well water and those bubbly drinks containing caffeine (It was on sale). Has nothing to do with y2k, though, our water supply simply has way too much chlorine in it and those Brita things are a PITA. If you run the water, you'll be able to smell the Cl from across the room and it tastes like pool water.
I have a feeling that *some* small towns are going to have a lot of trouble if they haven't checked by now.
Actually, small towns should be fine. Why? Became small towns don't have public water and sewer. Each house has its own, private water and waste facilities. As long as you have power (and a small generator will ensure that), you are all set.
It is the medium-sized towns -- the small cities -- that might have trouble. Big enough to need centralized systems, small enough to not be able to afford proper upkeep.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I'm not sure where to begin, so I'll just dive in . . .
First of all, the NRDC tends to, when making announcements, to err on the side of extreme alarmism. They mean well, but often make sensationalistic (sp) statements because, well, that's what it takes to get media attention.
Note that "The report said fewer than half of the drinking water utilities had completed all phases of Y2K preparations, including contingency planning and testing, as of June 1999, the date of the last industry survey." Is is possible that in the meantime many of the utilities have made significant progress towards this?
While many of the control systems in water treatement plands do require the use of embedded logic/controller chips (the exact name escapes me) they are NOT buried 30 feet underground. They are also not 20 to 30 years old. The treatment industry statndards are set by the feds (EPA) and get tougher every few years. To meet the tougher regs, plants switch to more advanced processes, which means new equipment. The last treatment plant I visited (Fairfield, CA) used a bank of pc's to control the processes at the entire plant. None of the treatment gear (with the exception of the sedimentation tanks) looked older than 10 years.
The water/wastewater industry is one of the most efficient and vigilant industries that I know of. The American Water Works Association as a professional oganization is honest to a fault. If they dispute the report, they must have a good reason.
Realistically, he most likely problem that MIGHT occur would be some sort of power failure (PGE&E in our parts is not guranteeing power) which would more than likely cause water supply pumps to stop pumping. This can create a loss of pressure and siphoning in the water lines, which can easily lead to contamination if your idiot neighbor decides to fill his dirty swimming pool on New Years Eve.
Does it make sense to have some water on hand just in case? Of course. Am I worried? No.
By the way, Some utilities are more than happy to give tours if you contact them in advance. Most people have no idea how involved the process actually is, and would benefit from a tour.
Most of my comments have been made in reference to water treatment, but can bea applied equally to wastewater treatment.
Actually, if working properly, they don't get full. They aren't a real tank, they have openings, they just contain the crap until it is broken down into less crappy crap by bacteria and stuff.
There are several aspects to this story that make it highly dubious. The first is that the last report was conducted in June. Few industries, ANYWHERE had completed their Y2K preparations as of June. The second is that even if the Y2K preparations are not complete there is no great likelihood of serious failure. Few industrial control systems are particularly date sensitive. Only the supervisory/accounting systems are. Finally these systems always include multiple levels of redundancy right down to manual override in case of primary control element failure.
This is going to be just another Y2K Chicken Little story drummed up by panic mongers.
Please be reasonable. Yes, much of the Y2K flap is fear mongering, but some of it is legitimate concern. No, I don't think it will be the end of the world. But the US, especially, is very dependend on computer systems, more than we sometimes realize. Y2K is just one way in which we are becoming increasingly aware of this.
This was done so that the causes of major failures could be determined and the appropriate people could be shot (just kidding).
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
None of this is to say that there might not be inflation between now and February, and it might conceivably be related to Y2K (although a suitable mechanism eludes me), but if that happens, the cause will not have been merely issuing extra currency.
-r
Don't be too quick to rely on well water. Just a few months ago, there was a large sewer main break in a town near here that contaminated all the wells. The whole town, homes and businesses, had to rely on trucked-in water for weeks.
It occurs to me that most USAmericans have a large 30 to 50 gallon water tank in their homes - their water heater. (I think tankless heaters are the norm in other parts of the world.) Would it be sufficient to just flush it out real good in the next week or two, then close the inlet valve around 11:59 on Dec 31 and not open it until you're heard "all clear"? I'd think that would at least give water clean enough to run through my camping filter before drinking.
Ironic that I saw this today, though - I just bought a 30 gallon water storage bag (sort of like a big "solar shower") this afternoon. Doubt I'll actually need it on Jan 1, but there's a good chance it'll come in handy someday. (Heck, even if I never need it for a disaster it'd be perfect for a camping trip in the desert.)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Geez, and here I was thinking it was safe to read slashdot! PLEASE! NO MORE Y2K STORIES!!!!!!
CSG_SurferDude
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