I think some organizations, particularly smaller businesses that find they haven't done the work they needed to do, could go out of business,'' said Bruce McConnell, director of the World Bank-funded International Y2K Cooperation Center. Some early damage was felt Thursday in Nigeria, where the state-run telephone company disconnected private carriers who it claimed had failed to prove themselves complaint and thus threatened the entire national network. A few thousand phone users lost service in Nigeria, a country widely assessed as poorly prepared. Still, it was a minor crisis compared to the income lost by an estimated 1,800 to 3,500 seasonal hotel workers laid off in Jamaica because of a dropoff in holiday tourists blamed on Y2K worries. Ditto to the south on Aruba.
Precaution is the watchword worldwide.
We're not taking any chances,'' said spokeswoman Liz Rahaman of Guyana Air 2000, which despite its name has canceled all flights on Friday and Saturday over concerns that aviation systems in that South American country are not Y2K-ready. Many airports, from Denmark to Bolivia, will also be closed for the rollover to the new millennium. So will everything from Korean and Polish steel mills, Israel's nuclear power plant, ports from Australia to Holland and Turkey barred big ships from its narrow Bosporus strait. In much of the developing world, where Y2K work began late and money was short, many of the fixes were makeshift. Colombia's air traffic radars, for example, were forwarded to the year 2028, which is identical to 2000 in having 366 days and in their distribution.