But this isn't that. So his committee also meets on Y2K issues with COG committe es on public safety, transportation and health as well as with area businesses. The goal is to figure out what systems may fail, how they will impact the Washington metropolitan area, the actions that must be taken in response, and how to set service res toration priorities. The city of Los Angeles doesn't need a jumper to be reminded that bad things can and do happen to nice infrastructure systems. The federal government has declared LA a disaster area ten times since 1992.
City officials know something about responding to emergencies.
Even so, the LA's Emergency Preparedness Division hired three contingency planners this week to deal with Y2K issues. Part of their mission will be educating the public on how to be prepared. According to Assistant Division Head Bob Canfield, the curren t situation is something like what the state faced with the El Nino weather pattern. Canfield says the public received so much information ahead of time, the whole subject became something of a joke. The El Nino may have washed away much of the humor but the well-informed city was relatively well prepared to deal with the soggy situation.