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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."
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....)
... at least if the planes crash, they will have a nice soft layer of sewage to hit. ;-)
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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
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. :-]
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:
I'm not suggesting that we're necessarily going to see a lot of damage from Y2K issues in water and sewer systems, but I think you'd be surprised how many systems are dependent on computer systems.
I was recently doing research on Information War (IW) for a report. The DoD has recently (last few years) done a lot of research into US IW vulnerability. The results indicate that 1) the US has a lot of targets that depend on computers, and 2) we lack the appropriate infrastructure to effectively communicate when our computer systems aren't functioning.
Don't write this kind of thing off, and don't ignore it. We've been living in a kind of information paradise for the last few years, building elaborate computer systems without appropriate fallbacks and safeguards. We should treat Y2K as wakeup call number one.
Do you really want to have your supplier either have to hook up a single water main to your house (at great expense) or have each of the regional suppliers have a bunch of mains through your neighborhood? Having just one main from a city-regulated water supplier leads to enough troubles as it is. Where are all those extra mains going to go?
There are certain things which, by their very nature, mandate a monopoly. This is why the government regulates it - better that it be paid for by taxes and be setup in the common interest than to be regulated by cost-cutting cutthroat competition.
Here in Albuquerque, the water/sewage treatment plants are self-sufficient. They use the fermented gasses from the sewage to power their own generators to get their own electricity. They also sell some of that electricity to the power company for some income. Oh, and they are mostly computer-automated; they have very few workers actually doing anything. It's practically autonomous and automatic. They're unsure as to whether all their systems are Y2K-compliant. If it isn't, then there'll be a few days of badly mistreated water. My mom, a microbiologist and science writer, has been taking samples from the incoming and outgoing streams (and she's fallen in love with the word "throughput," which is used in more situations than just webservers) for a grant with the city. She's looking forward to the interesting results from 1/1/2000.
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My job for over 10 years was computerizing fresh and waste-water treatment plants. Based upon my experience, I'm not terribly worried. I am certain there will be problems, but I think they will be little noticed by the public.
A computer-controlled water plant generally has 3 tiers: (1) the master control computer, (2) remote controllers, (3) manual controls. The master control computer communicates with the remote controllers, which do the actual work of monitoring and controlling the plant. The signals from the remote controllers are routed through manual controls (switches) to the various pumps and valves.
The master control computer (could be computers, in the case of a redundant system) is usually some kind of microcomputer. We put a fair number of Gateways, Dells, and other name-brand PC's in plants.
The remote controllers are usually some form of embedded system. The most common remote controllers are purpose-built for the task and are called PLC's (Programmable Logic Controllers).
The manual controls usually (I'll get to the exceptions) exist as regular old mechanical switches in the electrical path between the remote controllers and the pumps and valves. A typical manual control is a switch with three positions: "auto" leaves the remote controller in command, "man" forces the device to be on/open, no matter what the controller says, and "off" forces the device to be off/closed, no matter what the controller says.
Also, the remote control computers are usually programmed to operate independently of the master control station. Whenever the master control station goes down (a fairly routine occurance in most plants), the remote controllers keep the plant running based upon their pre-programmed control algorithms and upon the last instructions ("Keep the tank level between 12 and 15 feet") that they received from the master control station.
Every water plant I computerized in my career had this 3-tier architecture: master, remote, manual-overrides.
Because the remote controllers can carry on for some time (hours, at least), in the absense of the master computer, failure of the master -- say, to reboot it after a Y2K-induced freeze -- is not a big deal. And because of the manual-overrides, the plant can be run manually even if the remote controllers fail or start issuing goofy commands.
The real risk for a computerized plant experiencing y2k problems is not that you won't receive fresh water or have your sewage treated -- it's that the city will be paying large amounts of overtime for the extra staffing it takes to run the plant manually. If a city is dumb enough to not have the staff on call during that critical period, then it IS possible for y2k problems to become visible to the public in some way more dramatic than an increased personnel budget. Also, I worked on a few plants where the engineers were so insanely stupid that they allowed the manual overrides to be built into the remote controllers, not independent of them. I always lobbied hard to have such insanities corrected and was usually successful. Those plants without independent manual overrides are the ones in true danger. But I gotta tell you, the plant designed by such intellectual giants are in serious trouble *without* y2k.
All in all, I'm not worried -- I expect to get water and flush the toilet on the 1st without causing the collapse of civilization.
Wayne Conrad
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'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.
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.