Y2K analyst refutes positive assessments

A noted Y2K expert and analyst says he is “sticking by” his earlier
assessment that the nation’s utilities are liable to suffer widespread
failures caused by the so-called Millennium Bug, despite military claims
to the contrary.

Jim Lord, whose initial assessment report
caused a furor
among government officials and the press a few weeks ago, has issued an
updated Y2K utility compliance evaluation report that essentially echoes
his earlier conclusions that many of the country’s gas and electric
companies are not ready for the Y2K rollover.

Lord told WorldNetDaily that the government’s dismissal of his report
was “typical,” though he admitted Washington’s conflicting statements on
the issue confound him.

“I expected them to dismiss my report,” he said, “because that’s what
government normally does when it hears bad news.” But then to publish
their own reports that “directly refute their ‘official explanations’ of
the findings” contained in a formerly secret Navy report “is
remarkable.”

The point of Lord’s most recent assessment is, he says, to point out
the government’s conflicting statements regarding a secret Navy study
assessing the Y2K compliance of U.S. utility companies. In that report,
the Navy said some 125 American cities housing naval and other military
facilities would be affected by partial or full power and gas outages on
the first of the year.

“The government’s official response to my assessment was that things
were not nearly as bad as the Navy made them out to be,” Lord said.
“The Navy was told, according to government spokesmen, to assume the
worst case scenario
for utility companies they had no information about.”

But documents recently published on U.S. government and military
websites contradict “official explanations,” Lord said, “which tells me
that what I said in the first place was correct.”

Indeed, according to a document (this
is a .pdf document and cannot be opened without an Acrobat® reader)
published recently by the Department of Defense, local military
commanders were advised to assume utility companies were compliant if
they had no specific information about their readiness.

“The Navy says it was told to list unknown compliant utilities in the
‘worst possible scenario,'” Lord said. “But here comes the DoD later
on, telling commanders in an operational handbook to ‘assume unknown
utilities are going to be fine.’ Who’s right?”

“For purposes of preparing DoD business continuity and contingency
plans, DoD Components should assume that electric power, natural gas,
water service, waste treatment, financial services, transportation,
public voice and data communications, the Internet, mail service, and
the mass media will be available domestically, although it is possible
that there will be localized disruptions in some areas,” the Defense
report said.

Furthermore, Lord points to an additional Defense document
that also advises military commanders to assume “less than a worst-case
scenario” about utility companies they have no compliance information
about.

That document, called, “The Y2K Contingency Planning Handbook,” says,
“Should all research leave you with little or no reliable information
from which to assess the probability of failure, a medium probability
rating may be appropriate.”

“While DoD is telling OMB (Office of Management and Budget) one
thing,” Lord said, “it is telling its own commanders something
different, and in neither instance is a worst case assumed.”

In his updated assessment — entitled, “Waco and Y2K: Repeat
Performance?” which was provided to WorldNetDaily in advance — the Y2K
expert compares the government’s duplicity about the readiness of the
nation’s utilities infrastructure to recent revelations about Waco.

“The renewed Waco scandal is once again letting out the stench of
organized governmental deceit,” Lord wrote. “Daily revelations reawaken
terrible memories of the women and children and that awful inferno.”

Lord, a retired naval officer, also denounced the U.S. military’s
alleged involvement in covering up the facts about Y2K readiness.

“This once-proud military service is about to be dragged through the
mire of a massive criminal cover-up. The whole thing reeks and you can
bet the top officials are in full CYA mode,” the report said.

Shortly after Lord released his initial report, the Navy — which had
previously posted their findings on the Internet — pulled those web
pages offline, citing “certain parties were misrepresenting the facts.”
However, the Navy has since reposted a progress
chart, which, Lord says, has been showing “such rapid improvement (in
utilities preparedness) as to be unbelievable.”

“The progress they claim is so unrealistically impressive it can only
make one wonder if the current survey has any meaning at all,” he said.
In fact now, according to the Navy chart, almost no Y2K-related utility
disruptions for domestic military bases are “probably” or “likely” to
occur — though the Navy’s predictions were much more dire in
mid-August.

According to an Navy question-and-answer document, the nation’s sea
service believes only 6 percent of the country’s natural gas suppliers
will not be Y2K compliant on Jan. 1, 2000. The Navy also said petroleum
companies, already stocking up their reserves of motor fuels, will not
be impacted, nor will domestic power companies.

Widespread power outages, the Navy said, “are not based on facts or
rational analysis of information from the industry. Sporadic spot
outages in some areas is a far more likely scenario.”

“Prepare for this possibility as you would for an outage caused by a
winter storm,” the document added.