MPR: U.S. Senator Bob Bennett on Y2K

Are We Prepared?
Highlights from U.S. Senator Bob Bennett's speech at the MPR Y2K Community Conversation
by Andrew Haeg
July 21, 1999
Part of MPR Online's Y2K Coverage section.

U.S. Senator Bob Bennett (R-Utah) is chair of Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem. In a live videoconference speech from Washington, D.C., he addressed the MPR Y2K: Are We Prepared? summit at the University of St. Thomas on July 21, 1999. Here are the highlights of his speech and selections from questions asked by the summit attendees.

AS THE MILLENNIUM NEARS, U.S. Senator Bob Bennett said people concerned about the Y2K problem ask him whether they'll "be all right." After conducting compliance inquiries with most major industrial and government sectors of the USA infrastructure, Bennett says, "I find that I can't answer that question with absolute assurance." He said he has confidence in the broad areas such as the major power grids, telecommunications systems, banking and government, but cannot be sure that specific banks, power grids or telephone systems in certain regions will work. He said, for example, "I can't say with any assurance that your bank will work."

"If you stockpile anything with respect to Y2K, stockpile information. Check with your own bank, your own city and your own community. I've checked with mine." He trusts, for example, that the airlines have better specific information than he does; thus after checking with the airlines, he confided that flights in the U.S. will likely be OK. But he said he'd be a little nervous about flying overseas "because I can't check that out to the degree I can in the United States." With that, he exhorted people to check for themselves whether the services they depend on will be up and running.

"If all Americans check with their own Y2K lives, I think we'll get through this all right," he said.

"There will be individual problems with Y2K that will pop up almost at random," Bennett said. So, to those concerned individuals who approach him, he now says, "Don't depend on the U.S. Senate to solve your problem."

To a question from the audience about grading compliance, Bennett replied that he had seen the A,B,C,D,and F, scale as a very effective press gimmick that could draw attention to gaps in readiness. But an even more effective way to gauge, Bennett said, would be to ask organizations, " 'When will you be ready?'"

One example of a random problem

Bennett cited a recent foul-up in Van Nuys, California as an example of what may happen at the start of the new millennium. During a test of its city's systems for Y2K compliance, a computer switched a pipe valve to open rather than close. The pipe spewed some four million gallons of raw sewage onto the streets.

"Here's a glitch that could not have been predicted in advance," Bennett said. The city took care of it in 24 hours and it was not a systemic failure, "but indicative of the kind of thing that I think will happen," Bennett said. "It's not going to be catastrophe, but it's not going to be nothing."

From a horizontal to a vertical approach

"A little over a year ago now, we were looking at things horizontally," Bennett said. That meant looking at broad areas of businesses and organizations. But soon, Bennett said, he realized that organizations were "stovepiping the issue"- looking down only at their own organizations. He said they thought that "If the computers are all right where I am, then I'll be all right." The federal government's job, Bennett realized, was to look at the connections that might be ignored by individual organizations.

The government set priorities for examining Y2K compliance, aiming first at the major infrastructures industries and organizations including:

The power grid - "Because, if the lights go out, nothing else works, even if your computer is Y2K compliant," Bennett said.
Telecommunications - If the telephones don't work, Bennett said, then the power grid won't work, because some of the signals that allow electricity to flow are sent through phone lines.
Transportation - "Not just the FAA and air transport, but computers control the trucks with the dispatchers, they control the trains and the barges and the pipelines, the valves that get the natural gas and the heating oil," he said.
Banking and finance - Bennett said that the committee asked whether the stock market, the federal reserve and all the banks operate normally at the turn of the millennium.
Federal government services - Bennett said they then asked whether the defense department, the IRS and air traffic would continue working.
General Business - Bennett said they then asked whether businesses would continue to function.
Health Care - "We found some very serious problems there," Bennett said.

Melanie Soucheray of Minnesota Hospital and Health Care Partnership asked Bennett whether health care across the nation will be significantly affected by Y2K. Bennett said that the larger hospitals will be Y2K compliant. However, he said statistics indicate that the majority of hospitals will not be ready, but added that those statistics are misleading, because America has "an awful lot of hospitals with very few beds. The bigger organizations, those that are connected with large chains that cross state lines, or that are large operations within a state, "those are where the majority of beds are and those are likely to be ready. They have money, expertise and are visible to investigators," he said.

He said the problems will be in the small, perhaps rural hospitals, that have a lack of money and expertise to prepare for the problem. Bennett added to that the individual practitioners who have some medical devices, some of which have "fairly serious problems," and which, quite possibly could fail.

Digging for Y2K Information

Alan Cox raised a point that piqued Bennett, when he said that the media have had a tough time getting clear answers from the government and from businesses about Y2K preparedness because of fears of liability. "Is it realistic," Cox asked, "for people to be able to get a straight answer from the organizations and companies they deal with in the next five months?"

Bennett replied," I've run into that same problem at the federal level and occasionally I've had to at least say the dreaded word 'subpoena.'" He said that people often come before the committee, "tell them as little as possible, and as optimistically as possible." There's no way to get them to tell the truth, he said, but he offered one possible solution: "I've found that persistence pays off," he said. "And also, if you can get any kind of public organization, like our committee, or like our group in a local community, to keep asking the question pretty soon, people realize that if they don't give you straight answers, that they'll hurt their reputation in the community. We've seen people at the federal level come forward, give us bland answers, we start prodding and they discover that we're serious and they start to give us real ones."

Self-reporting is done by organizations who look at their own internal readiness and produce unaudited reports. Some have trouble trusting the validity of those reports. Thus, the General Accounting Office checks the organization's readiness and compares it to the report that the company produced internally. To read in-depth reports on many sectors of the government and private industry, go to the general accounting office's web site: http://www.gao.gov/y2kr.htm.

Bennett said that any information on federal organizations can be found on John Koskinen's web site, http://www.y2k.gov/java/index.htm, or through the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on the Y2K problem's web site: http://www.senate.gov/~bennett/y2k.html. "We do our best to get as hard a data as we can and distribute it as quickly as we can," he said.

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