In terms of contingency plans, our member company utilities indicate that contingency plans will be in place and they will have staff on duty during the date rollover period. To date, four workshops have been held, each having approximately 100 company representatives from the production, transmission, and distribution sectors of the industry. The summit was attended by John Koskinen, Chair of the President s Council on Y2K, and other renowned Y2K experts. Our members also have become quite active in the Community Conversation efforts initiated by the President s Council. Since utilities are usually a main focus at town forums, many of our members have participated in local community Y2K forums, or have plans to do so over the summer.
Reliability is one of the cornerstones of our industry.
To that end, the industry has made a substantial financial investment in evaluating, repairing, upgrading, and testing its systems and operations. Although many in the media focus on the down side of Y2K, in many ways Y2K has presented our members with an opportunity to improve their processes and operations. Utilities have been able to review their businesses infrastructure from top to bottom, test their systems, upgrade and improve many of these systems, and check their own preparedness when testing contingency plans. Since many utilities have participated, or will be participating in testing and drill activities this summer, I would like to share with you one example of a Y2K test and the positive lessons learned from that test. The drill focused on the telecommunications systems, and was designed to test the company's ability to operate with limited communications.