Art Bell and Stuart H. Rodman explore Y2K’s 1998 U.S. Department of Energy report, warning of potential continent-wide blackouts from "common mode failure" in automated grid devices like voltage regulators and breakers—critical for energy transmission. NERC, formed in 1965 with no enforcement authority, estimated $2B–$7B in repairs, including Iowa’s $32M–$75M costs, while Florida and Ontario prepared for rationing or "brownoffs." Australian resilience contrasts with U.S. urban dependency, yet banks and utilities lag on fixes for credit systems. Intel’s upcoming codec integration may boost Alaska’s internet bandwidth, but Bell urges listeners to prepare for possible cascading failures in power, banking, and infrastructure. [Automatically generated summary]
I bid you all good evening or good morning as the case may be.
Wherever you are, from the Pokemon and Hawaiian Islands, in the West Eastern Caribbean, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, California and St. Thomas, down to South America, up to the North Pole, worldwide, and on the internet, thank youbroadcast.com.
This is coast to coast AM, whatever that is, and on any given night, is something different.
Tonight, we are going to talk a little bit about Y2K, the Stuart Kate Ross, and how it relates, what might happen with a power grid.
There's a lot of interesting discussion going on about the power grid.
There are some assurances, somewhat hollow assurances about the power grid that are being issued by not exactly sure who.
But we'll see what Mr. Rodman thinks about the power grid.
Now, I depend on the power, as you know, to broadcast.
Actually, a whole lot more than that.
I depend on so much broadcast.
Satellites, telecommunications, power, radio stations having all of that too.
Y2K is going to be interesting for broadcasters and me in particular.
Otherwise, the lead item tonight.
Last night it was a basketball player.
Jordan retiring is the lead story.
Tonight, it's Maguire's 70th home run ball that sold for $3 million at auction.
$3 million for a baseball.
Yes, Maguire's 70th home run ball, I guess, but a baseball, nevertheless.
Like any other baseball, I suppose it's signed by him, I think.
Now, you know, I wonder who the money goes to.
This is five to six times the record of any other sports artifact ever zoned.
23 times the world record for any baseball ever sold.
$3 million for one baseball.
Hey.
Guy will probably put it up on the mantle and some maid will come in and wipe it off, you know.
Somebody sent me this earlier.
Actually, it's from Cooter in Montgomery, Alabama, entitled Wisdom Teeth, and it has to do with money.
One day a man walks into a dentist's office and asks how much it will cost to extract wisdom teeth.
Says the dentist, $80.
By the way, that's a very good bargain.
But the man says, that's a ridiculous amount.
Isn't there a cheaper way?
Well, the dentist says, if you don't use anesthetic, I can knock it down to $60.
The man says, well, that's still too expensive for me.
So the dentist says, okay, look, if I save on anesthesia and simply rip the teeth out with a pair of pliers, well, we can get it down to $10, maybe $20.
The man moans and says, no, still too much.
Dentist says, scratching his head, well, if I let one of my students do it for the experience, I suppose I could charge you just $10.
Marvelous, the man says.
Book to my wife for next Tuesday.
Larry Flint and the White House.
Not usually two names that you would choose, a name and a thing that you would associate with each other, Larry Flint in the White House.
This is the exact program where Larry would do a really good interview, because I let people say what they want to say.
I interviewed his competitor, so why not Larry?
Republicans suggested Tuesday that the White House may be involved in Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynn's efforts to brand Republican Bob Barr as a hypocrite for his past personal conduct.
Flint released a January 8th affidavit from Barr's former wife in which she says she believes he was having an affair in the mid-80s with a woman who is now his present wife.
If that's the best he can do, the White House ought to get another agent, said John Linder, a Republican from Georgia.
So the personal destruction in politics continues.
They really do go after each other, and this really gets, it's been down and dirty now for a long time, hasn't it?
You know, when they get digging into each other's sex lives, you know, they've hit bottom.
During the impeachment trial in the Senate, the president has decided he will travel.
He'll be gone to all sorts of places, a very busy travel schedule during the trial.
You know, that way he won't be available for reaction on a daily basis.
I haven't talked about it because I haven't wanted to, I've been afraid that it would encourage copycats, but thank God.
Somebody you see here in Nevada has been shooting wild horses, and that somebody is now, if this is the person arrested in jail for it, police arrested a Reno construction worker on Tuesday and plan to charge two Marines in California in the slaughter of 34 wild horses shot to death in Nevada with high-powered rifles.
You know, so if they did that, I hope they roast.
I mean, we have wild horses here in Nevada, and they have a tough enough time as it is.
You know, they look for water.
If it's a bad year for water, we can lose quite a few that way, and we like our wild horses and burrows and such here in Nevada.
And what kind of human being would go and slowly just sort of conduct a genocide of them with high-powered rifles as a hobby?
Poof, that's really, really, really bad.
Well, I'm still getting people who are calling me about this thing that exploded nearly over Anchorage.
It re-entered from who knows where, and it was who knows what.
And it exploded over Anchorage, causing or concurrent with a 2.2 magnitude earthquake, who knows which.
My guess is that since it occurred, then that magnitude 2.whate was from the explosion.
Now, interestingly, folks, the explosion occurred 50 miles up, they say.
50 miles up.
And it was something about the size, they think, of a basketball.
Now, that's a basketball.
What if it had been the size of a Volkswagen?
In other words, is there a linear scale to the size of the explosion based on the size of the item?
I believe there is.
I've got a new picture up on the website.
It's simply called Art's Hole.
In fact, somebody sent me the following by email who saw it.
Just to let you know, Arch, when I saw on your page that there was a picture of Arts Hole, I fell out of my chair laughing and ended up spraining my left ankle.
Maybe you should tell Keith to change the title before somebody out there seriously hurts themselves.
No hard feelings, though.
Oh, by the way, I got a great Art Bell Show complaint form.
And I think we're going to put that up on the website, too.
It's just absolutely ideal for my program.
So if you have a complaint, you'll be able to go up to the website and get the standard complaint form soon.
Maybe even tonight.
Right, Keith?
We'll see.
Anyway, listen, there is now a website for an upcoming NBC movie confirmation.
I'll try and get a link on that if I can.
Whitley Streeber, of course, his book confirmation, now an NBC movie.
You're going to see me in that movie someplace or another.
I have no idea where.
You can also see me on Millennium.
That's going to be on the 22nd, Friday night, Fox, 8 o'clock.
If you're not around, set a VCR or something.
If you wish to.
I had fun.
I played me.
I never realized it would be so hard to play me.
Figure you'd go to play yourself.
Hey, no problem.
I can do that.
Standing on my head.
Well, not really.
And I won't go over all the agonizing details again, but even playing yourself requires a lot of practice when you do it for TV.
TV is really different than radio.
Really, really different.
Here, there is, at least at this location, there's me.
That's it.
I have my wonderful wife who helps out.
I have somebody in Oregon who runs a board and runs the top and bottom of our commercials.
But otherwise, you know, there's just me.
But when there's television, oh, there's so many people involved and they're so professional.
You know, you've got like 20 and 30 people revolving all around you and there's this intense frenetic activity.
And then they say action.
And there's intense silence.
And it's like, oh, the pressure is on you.
Blow the line, and you cause 20 to 30 people to mentally go, and, you know, and so there's a great deal of pressure on you to do the right thing.
A whole lot of pressure.
Then there's the director who probably goes into the back room and bats his head up against the wall several times a day.
I don't know.
I think TV people probably die young because of all the pressure.
Or maybe it toughens them to the task.
I don't know.
Anyway, millennium on the 22nd, we will return in just one moment.
I have a special message from men about male potency.
Anybody out there know what a Furby is?
That's right, a Furby.
I guess these are toys that repeat things you tell them.
Well, this is an associated press story.
First of all, so you know I'm telling you the truth.
Came in today.
First, they foiled thousands of wary parents desperately scouring store shelves to buy their kids a holiday toy.
It was a Furby, you know.
And now they are considered a possible threat to national security.
The National Security Agency, or NSA, has banned the popular pets from its Fort Meade premises in Maryland.
In an internal message to workers, NSA issued a warning of toy, which is embedded with a computer chip that allows it to utter 200 words, 100 in English, and 100 in furbish.
Actually, according to the Post, Washington Post, because of the Furby's ability to repeat some of what it does here, NSA officials are obviously worried that people would take their Furbies home and the Furbies would begin talking classified.
I had a little fun with the electric company today.
After hearing on ZDTV, that's a TV that promotes different websites during the day, they sort of want to get you introduced to computer.
Okay?
So one week they do WWW, another week they do America Online.
And interesting things came on today.
This is what the girl said.
In brief, she said that, fear not, electric companies say that their grids will not go down because of computer problems because the grids are on old analog systems.
All right, so I call up PASEG, and I said to them exactly what she said.
Discontinuity being something past which he could not see, kind of like a brick wall in time, if you will.
And for a period of time, Ed Dames had what he called the discontinuity.
In other words, there was no continuity past a certain point.
So discontinuity, that's a fair word.
unidentified
Yeah.
This television station, ZDTV, if you check into it, lo and behold, when I actually put it on today, the first thing I heard was, I can't pronounce his name right, Joe Furbish.
Joe Furmage is, I joked around, I called him a gazillionaire who is stepping down as CEO of a major corporation so that they might not experience publicity that would be negative.
And, of course, print media has it.
And anytime anything out of their little box, you know, regular news is reported, they cannot resist approaching the story with an agenda, their agenda, a certain way they want to tell the story.
It's like when they write about me, they have a certain way they want to tell it.
You know, the king of the millennium or whatever.
So I've kind of learned about them, and I'm going to just have fun with the media, and I guess that's what Joe's going to have to do, too.
We are going to have him back on the program.
unidentified
KNCO Grass Valley, a service of Nevada County broadcasters in our 20th year of broadcast excellence.
Many of the things you hear me talk about on both my shows, mostly unfounded, but there were some problems, a few glitches that did pop up.
A sign that from Here through the new year, things could get a little tricky.
For instance, in Singapore, computerized taxi meters all went dead at noon January 1st for about two hours.
Two medical products, a Hewlett-Packard external defilibrator, yes, and a get this, the name of it, the Millennia 3500 multi-parameter patient monitor.
Perform basic functions properly, but display the wrong time and date if not reset properly.
Well, that's good.
Imagine if the patient monitor said he's dead.
Okay, unplug him.
According to the Sunday Telegraph in Sydney, Australia, computers at police officers, offices rather, in three Swedish airports failed at midnight January 1st.
They couldn't recognize the year 1999.
These sorts of things are beginning now to occur.
But again, everybody who knows what they're talking about says do not expect January 1st to be some sort of Armageddon date because only about 8% of what's going to go wrong will happen actually on January 1st.
The rest of it is going to be spread out between now and the ending of the year 2000 and maybe even beyond.
The main reason I called was that since your guests are going to be talking about the power distribution, we had a recent YTK program on a local show, and one of the people for the local power company who's tied into the Minnesota grid and whatever they're tied into.
But they said that they had them discuss about what would happen in the event that one of them should try to effectively cause all of them to come down.
Yes.
And they said that they can apparently, at least here in Manitoba, they can disconnect within two seconds.
But if that's the case, then maybe you could explain to me why one-third of the entire United States, Canada, and Mexico went out and stayed out for a long time.
unidentified
Well, it didn't happen in Manitoba when that happened.
I have found that making statements like the one you just did almost inevitably brings on a power failure.
unidentified
Yeah.
Well, in the past history, that's been the case.
Now, of course, there will always be exceptions, like when some major windstorm one time knocked out a lot of towers, and it was when the jet stream came down on deck.
Yeah.
It took out quite a few towers with incredible force and power.
And we have an interesting power transmission that says, I think as a ham radio operator, you probably think it was kind of interesting.
The power lines are so long that if they used AC power, you would, for transmission from all the way up north and the hydroelectric stations all the way to the south, so long that if you used AC, it would generate a standing wave.
So you couldn't effectively transmit power using it.
Long-line electric companies are interesting in a lot of ways.
And you'd have to be sort of a technical type to understand, but to be resonant at 60 cycles, you'd begin losing most of your power to the air.
It would be radiated as a horrid noise that would interfere with everything it encountered.
And then we have the long lines here in the U.S. that when we have a solar flare, they are so much of an antenna that they collect so much voltage that they can literally blow power stations.
It's really incredible.
And that's from the sun.
You know, when we get a geomagnetic storm, that can so overload them.
If you want to try and make a case for some sort of orchestrated malicious intent to the universe, I don't think it's there in that organization alone.
So that's going to be the topic of discussion coming up next.
From the high desert, I'm Mark Bell, and this is the Go Anywhere, Coast to Coast.
A.M. We're going to be talking about Y2K.
Get a comfortable seat.
We'll be right back.
Remember how you used to feel?
Enjoying some seasonal winter weather here today.
It's cool, cooler than normal, but still very pleasant.
Your typical daytime temperature is about what?
I would say that normally we would have a high this day, probably in the upper 60s.
And typically at night, it might get down into the 50s.
Slightly on the cool side.
It's a little cooler here, but daytime temperatures are about the same.
That's interesting.
Okay, well, anyway, you have written, I guess, if I understand what I'm reading here correctly, you've got a hell of an education.
Then you began doing some writing about the Y2K business coming up and ran into some sort of brick wall regarding publication because of the nature of the material?
I'm not sure if I would characterize it exactly as a brick wall.
Some of the pieces that I have written are relatively new.
I started doing my writing as such in response to a report which I saw, which really motivated me to put the pencil to the paper.
And that report was released by the United States Department of Energy on or about September 17th of 1998.
And so many of the articles that I've written really deal specifically with the content of that report.
And I've tried, in fact, to maintain a very narrow focus.
The report that I'm referring to.
How'd you get the report?
I came about this Basically, in a sort of securitous way, I started out looking into the issue of the electric power grid through the help of my local congressional delegation.
I was quite concerned as I learned more about the problem that we could be facing more than just a minor inconvenience.
And just as a normal citizen, a father, a husband, and working person, I was quite concerned about what all this was going to mean to myself, my family, and my community.
And probably like a lot of people, I imagine, I wanted to get a handle on this as quickly as I could because I understood that the clock was ticking.
It sure is.
It definitely is.
Now, the title of your website, The Last Days of Power, that's pretty ominous.
There's certainly plenty of reason to be concerned.
As you pointed out, I've heard some of your discussion in a previous hour.
There's a lot of talk being said on the optimistic side, and I'd like to talk about that in the course of our discussion also.
But in balance, even those who are responsible for explaining to the public and to the government what the condition of the power system is themselves hold back some degree of reservation.
I think your listeners might want to hear about that as well.
Well, I think they might.
Was this a private report or a public report that you got?
Okay, the report was commissioned, actually.
It's a public issue.
Maybe I can just start near the beginning to this, and some of these matters will become clear.
Under a special authority granted by the President of the United States on February 4th, 1998, the United States Department of Energy selected a private group of industry elites, the cream, you might say, of the electric power industry in this country.
Would these be the technical people or would these be the CEOs and stuff like that?
I would say it's a cross-section, although the people that are in this organization, and we should probably identify that organization in just a moment, work for that organization.
They're no longer necessarily affiliated with any of the so-called bulk energy providers, of which there are about 200 in the continent.
They work for the organization for the most part on a full-time basis.
And so the organization has its own organizational management hierarchy.
And it includes certainly some very talented people, both administratively.
And just exactly how many of them are Masons?
unidentified
Okay, now that's a question that I'm not really prepared to answer.
So you have this group, a mixed group of industry leaders and technical types, and they're doing a report on the state.
What is it?
The state of the power grid itself.
Okay, let me try to explain what their mission was.
All right.
Getting back just a moment again to the United States Department of Energy.
They selected this group, and I'm going to name it because it's important that we discuss them and their work, and who they are.
This group is called the North American Electric Reliability Council.
Actually, listeners of your program may be among the very first in the nation to know about them because very gifted and talented correspondent Linda Molten Howe wrote that story on her Dreamland segment on December 13th.
That's correct.
And I think she did a tremendous public service in doing so.
This group, as I said, is comprised of representatives from within the industry.
They do not have enforcement powers.
They work exclusively by peer pressure, much like a trade association.
However, they were formed in 1965.
Okay, well, doesn't that kind of make them industry-friendly then automatically?
Yes, that's going to be, yes, it's fair to say that they are going to do the best they can to put a happy face on this.
Although I in no way want to impugn their objectivity, integrity, or dedication.
In fact, I would say that this particular group of people is extremely dedicated to making next New Year's Day, if they can, a happy New Year's Day for all of us and the representatives of their industry.
Do you think it's going to be a happy day?
Can I answer that in two ways?
First, talk about myself just for a moment.
And I will try to answer that too, specifically.
But I just want to let the people know who are listening that the work that I've done, I tried very hard, and I want to try to maintain that posture throughout the show.
I want to be more the messenger than the analyst.
What I think that I'm going to be able to do for your listeners is bring you inside the industry and let you hear what these people are saying.
And I think that'll be the first time that this has been done.
Up until now, most of the information that's been distributed from NERC, that's the NERC, North American Electric Reliability Council, has been published from their website, which anybody can see.
It's in public domain.
It's written in that Adobe format that we all love so much, the PDF.
So you would need an Adobe reader to see it.
But you could also get it from them in the mail, or you can get the report downloaded on the Internet from the...
No, but for some reason, it has not reached a level of dissemination that it really deserves to be.
It's crucially important, and it represents not the speculative work of observers, but the actual results of an assessment, which they were commissioned to do at the behest of the United States Department of Energy over the summer.
And it details what they found within the power grid in terms of parts that are and parts that are not Y2K vulnerable.
And it details as well a plan.
People may want to know.
Maybe they won't want to know.
What the power companies are planning?
Right, they actually have a Y2K rescue plan.
There is a plan, the official plan.
No kidding.
Yes, there truly is one.
Now, is this something that the power you said they don't have powers of enforcement?
Correct.
So they will pass on their recommendation.
Recommendations, I suppose, get passed on through the power associations and back and forth to the power companies.
How much reliability would you put in the concept that power companies are going to embrace this plan and go to action?
And it's sort of an auspicious, you've selected a very auspicious time to ask it anyway, because I've referred in the last couple of moments to the plan that was released on September 17th, 1998, which was the result of the very first ever formal industry-wide assessment of Y2K preparedness.
Now, as part of the arrangement that they made with the United States Department of Energy, NERC agreed to put out additional quarterly reports and post them on their website for public inspection right through July 1999, among other things.
They also took on other responsibilities by way of public disclosure responsibility.
And it just so happens you're asking this question of me the day after their second ever quarterly report was published.
That would have been yesterday, Monday, January 11th.
So the question of how much progress is being made, you can kind of chart what the progress that has been made and the progress that has not been made.
Again, if you look at what has just been released or what was previously released in an overview kind of way, is it going to be a serious...
But before we get to the details, if you were to answer the question that I did pose, and that is, are we going to have a really good day or is it going to be a rough day?
Sort of as an overall thing, what would you say?
Okay, I'm going to try to answer that based on the facts as I know them in the plan.
He is saying that basically, even if we don't have a problem, our recommendation is that we do have a problem.
Now, maybe I'm reading this wrong.
In other words, they're going to set up a sort of an action call that is going to result in some problems, even if there's no problem at all?
Yes, I think that one way to phrase it that might make sense of that, and maybe this is a little bit overly cute, but I think that it's fair to say that the North American Power Grid has contacted a bug.
I don't know which bug that is, but I think what we might want to add is that there are many people that may not like the somewhat bitter medicine that's going to be used to cure it.
All right, so are we going to say, do you want to start out by saying that Y2K is not necessarily a real problem?
Do you want to make that statement or can you not make that statement?
No, I would make that statement.
Y2K is very much of a real problem in the power grid.
It is.
Yes, very definitely.
And the plan that I referred to a moment ago as bitter medicine is necessary because of the threat that Y2K does pose to the infrastructure.
All right.
So what is their plan?
Okay, in its essence, of course, they have dates that they've established.
They're going to basically spend a considerable amount of time, energy, and resources financially to identify where the vulnerable pieces are.
And I think we should talk a little bit about what that really is, what those parts are.
Many people think those are computers.
Right.
Well, if only that were the case, we'd all be a lot happier.
Computers are kind of warm and fuzzy in a way.
Granted, they're certainly machines, but think of a computer.
It's sort of big.
You can see it.
And they're put in places where people will see them because they have keyboards, they have monitors.
In other words, they're built and designed for access by human operators.
Now, the computers, this may be somewhat in controversy.
NERC says, though, that in the electric power grid, surprisingly enough, computers play only a very small role.
And they're fairly confident that the computer problems, I'm speaking about computer problems specifically, will, in all likelihood, be resolved well in advance of the computer.
Do you hear Kathy from Woodbridge, New Jersey, who called last hour?
I believe I did, yeah.
She's the one who said that they're worried about their billing more than they are the power.
I would hate to have a bill for $100,000 instead of $100.
me too.
But at least, hopefully, if that should happen, and hopefully it won't, but if it does, at least we'd have a point of debate there and we wouldn't freeze to death or go without running water or have any of these other horrible things that I would say it's the automated, to borrow a term from the Cold War, maybe it's the automated black box equipment.
We're talking about things that are built into the system.
Maybe they're not visible to operators.
They don't need human operators for the most part.
When they were built, there was no expectation that anything could ever go wrong.
One of these black boxes, give me an idea or a typical function where one might be used.
Okay, let's start with the concept of voltage regulation.
In your car, in our automobiles, as far as I know, almost all of them have some kind of voltage regulation.
Absolutely.
In the power grid, they have similar kinds of devices.
They're not something you buy off the shelf.
You wouldn't go to a radio shack.
Right, you wouldn't be able to do that.
They were built, many of them, years ago.
They are fully automated in many cases.
They don't have, in other words, switches, dials, gauges, or things that would tell a human operator what's going on inside of them.
They have what other guests that you've had correctly identified as embedded chips.
And that's kind of why there's a debate going on somewhat or some confusion about the information that's been coming out of NERC lately as it's been delivered to the U.S. Department of Energy, because there are automated parts that do not have date sensitivity and so therefore are not Y2K vulnerable.
But what I'm going to be speaking about are the parts that NERC has positively, absolutely identified without any doubt as being date sensitive.
Okay.
And they use another term, which listeners should want to make note of.
In addition to being date-sensitive, they're also mission-critical.
You'll see, mission critical is the issue that's discussed by the United States Department of Energy, and it's kind of caught on throughout the industry.
And so the relevance here being that it's the mission critical parts that really pose the threat to the supply and generation of electricity.
So they have identified with certainty some black box regulator type equipment and other things, I guess, too.
Other things which are very important to know about, yes.
We all understand the concept of a surge protector now.
Well, they have these digital electronic surge protectors.
And then a lot of the other component tree, which is, and I'm only going to speak about the mission critical component, not the customer service, as important as that is.
But as far as mission critical, also the parts that we would want to talk about would be circuit breakers.
And obviously, we can all appreciate the importance of working circuit breakers.
And so the function of these parts in general, if I can characterize them, is to, on the one hand, protect the infrastructure.
A lot of these are protective in nature to prevent further more widespread damage in the event of unregulated flow of voltage.
Right.
And other ones, mission-critical other ones, are used in the transmission of energy from point to point.
Right.
Right.
Breaking it at the right point, whatever.
Correct.
Now, maybe here's where we stop for a second, Stuart, and I should ask you what you know about the grid itself.
Actually, the power grid is a really, really mysterious thing.
I would assume the mission of the grid would be to sort of be a widely interconnected net in which if one little segment fails, other areas can rush in and fill the gap temporarily until whatever it is comes back up.
That would seem to me to be the intent.
Correct.
And a good idea.
Correct.
However, the very accomplishment of that mission makes possible the exact opposite apparently at times.
In other words, one, we've had lots of power failures out here in the West.
I mean, some real whiz-bangers where the western third of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico went off.
And the final story we get is that a little power generating plant somewhere In Idaho went down, and so, you know, 40 million people lost power.
So, apparently, the grid works two ways: it can protect, or it can be the domino chain, right?
You know, I'm so glad you're bringing that up.
And I've heard you talk about this issue before, and I want to try to add some clarity to that.
Please.
Okay.
First of all, you're quite correct, as usual, when you say that the grid is complex and also that it's interconnected.
But it's also autonomous.
Generally speaking, the grid is comprised, you know, some people say four, but there are basically three broad sectors in the grid, the eastern, the western, and one which is called the ERCOT, which is basically the state of Texas.
In other words, they don't need each other to work within their own separate domains.
Right.
And so a disturbance in one should be contained and not necessarily spread like a virus might spread into another.
Right.
That's what you would think.
Now, there are two reasons, though, that I want to bring up that general logic breaks down.
And specifically, it breaks down in the Y2K scenario.
And I'm going to explain that.
But first, before I explain Y and Y2K, let me just give you one other general idea about how these parts relate to each other, which may explain some of the phenomenon that you've been talking about.
All right.
Of course, there's always a possibility of an accident.
A truck could roll into a power station over some important connections.
And that could have a cascading effect through that interconnection.
In fact, NERC in the report talks about the fact that if even one power station were to go down, it would and could theoretically adversely affect that entire interconnection, which they really mean is the sector.
In other words, the western third of the U.S., as an example.
Now, if enough people do this, or if it gets cold enough, the local utility company in New York City may no longer have enough localized generating capacity to meet that demand.
Out here, it occurs during the summer, peak demand with air conditioners and so forth.
Okay, I understand.
And we have the same kind of situation here in Florida.
But routinely and without our knowledge, Art, and it's perfectly fine and legitimate in most circumstances, our local utility company has already made arrangements as a member of the grid when this happens, when the demand increases beyond their immediate supply, to use this automated equipment, which I've referred to, to enable electric power, maybe from Nevada, if it's a nice, pleasant day over there, to come into New York City to meet that rise in demand.
On the surface, this certainly makes sense.
Okay, now that's, it's going to be very important, I think, though, to understand why I'm concerned about what's going to happen next year, though.
This is called a transfer.
It's logical enough.
It's an energy transfer, a power transfer.
Sure.
And that's why we have transmission line.
Now, if one of those, just to go back to your basic question, if one of the sectors, let's say that exactly what I said takes place, that people in New York want energy from Nevada, but let's say that the western section did have one of the disturbances of the nature that you described actually having happened in the past.
And I'm going to use a good one here because this is the ultimate nightmare for planners in the electric industry right now as they think about Y2K.
Right.
It's called the common mode failure.
Three words, common mode failure.
Common mode failure.
The common mode failure is when parts of the same type with the same function from the same manufacturer.
All go down.
All go down for the same reason at the same time.
Gotcha.
Irregardless of their physical location.
Right.
Now, if you think about the fact that there are 200 so-called bulk energy providers in the power grid, those are the people that you send your electric bill to.
And also they have a responsibility to keep the cost down.
They have that responsibility to the shareholders that own those companies and to the public who don't want to have to pay any more for the power than they have to.
So they talk and they may find out, or the vendors may tell them that, you know, hey, my electronic relay device has been used in all your competitors for the last 10 years and it's got a proven history of reliability, et cetera, et cetera.
So it's probable to assume, because there are only X number of vendors and X number of specialty power transmission parts makers, that a given part, a given brand, a given function, is fairly widespread throughout the North American continent.
Right, gotcha.
unidentified
Well, if, now for years and years, that was no problem.
And in fairness, Nerck points out that as the system developed, they made provision for this common mode failure concept, although I doubt that they ever really expected that they'd actually come face to face with that exact scenario so soon.
It's just, to put another way, electric companies tend to use the same vendors and equipment.
The common mode failure, though, the common mode failure is the ultimate nightmare as far as the operation of the power grid next year.
If it turns out that, for instance, that there are components like that spread throughout the continent, and they are undetected, they go undetected by the best efforts of all the people that are out there trying to find them.
So you have a piece in Nevada, you have a piece in Texas, you have a piece in Florida, maybe you have a piece in Quebec, and they're mission-critical.
Right.
And they escape detection, and they're all aid-sensitive, and they're all Y2K vulnerable.
They all go out at the same time.
So now you have three or maybe even four sectors of the continent that go down for the same reason at the same time.
And so despite the fail-safe mechanisms that are built into the different sectors, we found a way, or Y2K in this case, has found a way to defeat that defense barrier.
And now we have, in this nightmarish scenario, a full-blown widespread continent-wide blackout.
I assume that NERC assumes for their report that that is a possibility.
They say that, in their language, that Y2K poses a unique threat.
Their report is more upbeat than the scenario that I've described right now.
And with good cause, I think that they've done a good job up until now in assessing the respective utility companies to determine how many parts are out there that are date sensitive, where they are, and what can be done about them.
They say that by the end of June 1999, they're going to complete this process.
They do say, on the other hand, in their literature, in each report that they've published, since they've been asked to publish, that it is, and I'm going to attempt to quote them here, it is inconceivable.
They're saying they're going to close down the grid for two weeks prior to and then maybe two weeks after Christmas?
Now, they hope that it will not be necessary to go to that extreme, but they plan.
And what they say, and here is the language that they use, and it's in their report for your listeners to see.
Sure, go ahead.
Go ahead.
The grid will be operated in what is called a precautionary mode, that's a quote, precautionary mode, during the critical transition period, which is the time that I just discussed.
Examples of precautionary operation include reduced power transfers, bringing additional generation capacity, capability, excuse me, online, increasing the staffing levels at stations and substations.
And so what they're hoping is that because they're going to basically make it impossible or very difficult for a utility company to buy power outside of its own district, they're hoping that by bringing on older generation power generating equipment, that they may be able to work around the potential need to transfer.
And in fact, we may know from recent headlines that during the Christmas season this year, 93 people, according to the Associated Press, died nationwide during the ice storms that we experienced here on the East and in the Midwest.
So the idea that we will be able to go two weeks without having some kind of adverse weather situation for somebody somewhere within the continent is really expecting a great deal of good fortune.
But even beyond that, on a regular basis, I would imagine there are areas that use power in excess regularly of what they generate locally.
You know, they've had these drives in the past in other areas, and usually it results in one thing, higher prices.
They've had water conservation, and areas have actually done better than expected.
People really conserve a lot of water.
And then, you know, the thanks they get for it is a higher water bill because the company has to make a profit.
If they're not pumping a lot of water, they're not making a lot of money.
Right.
It's got the always has the consumer is always the loser.
Well, you know, that's a really good point.
Yeah, and in fact, I'd like to point out that for many of us, whether or not there are Y2K equipment failures, whether or not there is bad weather, the disaster art has already happened.
The disaster has already happened for many people.
A conservative estimate of the cost of the Y2K repair effort in the electric utility industry is a conservative estimate is $2 billion.
That is apparently the money that's already been spent and we haven't finished.
One utility company in Iowa has spent, estimates their cost, just for this one company alone, ranging between $32 to $75 million.
Now, if you project that out, over 200 bulk energy providers, if they should have a similar experience, you're talking about maybe from $3 to $7 billion.
And certainly we all hope that it's not necessary to spend that much money.
But ultimately, who will bear the price?
So I believe that if the Herculean efforts of those involved in remediating the grid succeed, that still hasn't prevented the catastrophe of the public having to come up with another $2, $3, $6, $7 billion.
We have that.
However, the concept of rationing, as they plan it, may or may not have an additional monetary consequence.
I don't know exactly about that.
But it is the plan that the, as I said, that each district will live within their own means.
They will attempt to offset the loss of transfer by, as I said, bringing on additional pieces of generating equipment.
But that does not guarantee in any sense that the level of demand will not exceed the supply.
And you mentioned just a moment ago the fact that there are alerts and so on and so forth.
And I wanted to mention there are such a thing as generating capacity plans, and they generally follow three stages.
One is the advisory stage, then there is a formal alert, and finally an emergency.
And the alert, you know, if we start with the advisory, we may start to hear about that again towards the end of next year, where they will be encouraging.
Each utility company knows how many megawatts they have online at any given moment.
So in other words, if you hear your local radio and TV stations really beginning to issue severe cutback, turn that switch off kind of things, then you could be in a problematic area.
They will tell you, I suspect, during the advisory stage, first, you know, the lowest level of alert, the lowest level in the plan, to voluntarily curtail.
Now, you know, many states we do here in Florida have contractual plans available on a voluntary basis where you as an individual customer can have your bill reduced by agreeing in advance to granting your local electric company the authority to turn off certain of your appliances.
Oh, we have that out here, too, and they have little gizmos they attach to for air conditioning.
Exactly.
That's in the early stages of, that goes after the advisory.
In order to bring demand down, the first line of response is to, is for the electric companies to take advantage of those contractual grants.
And they also have another, they have interrupted service, which is another concept.
That's where, for the most part, industrial customers who have their own independent power generating equipment, you know, standalone generators and so forth, backup provisions, will then be shut off.
They'll be cut off from the grid because they've agreed to allow this to happen knowing that they have capacity of their own, which will get them through for some period of time.
So that would be the next step in the alert.
They'll cut them off if it should be necessary to do so.
If demand continues to rise, despite these efforts, the next step would be to, with or without warning, they do say that every effort would be made to provide advanced warning.
And in fact, if we have the time, I'd like to tell you about a very infamous experience.
Nevertheless, we do have the time, not right now, but you were going to say with or without warning they would shut an area off.
I had Another piece of information that I wanted to pass along in reference to that, too, which maybe later on in the show, if we have a chance I'd like to bring up.
People, as you say, though, may be sleeping through this.
And I don't mean the show, but I mean through this whole Y2K thing and people leaving that.
A lot of people sleep through my show.
That's something you have to do.
I hope that's not true, and I'm not usually one of them myself.
We should take a moment to mention, in fact, what a tremendous public service you and your guests have provided for your listeners and the public.
Well, it's an alternative source of information that really isn't much elsewhere.
Yes, it's unique, and it's regrettable.
I heard you speaking earlier in the evening, and I have to agree with you, that it seems as if the mainstream media doesn't hear what they want to hear.
They simply pretend it isn't being said, or worse.
And so if people want to hear, get a balanced view of what's really going on, they need to attend to forums like the kind that you provide for people.
That's right.
And I think you, more than anybody else that I'm aware of, really deserve special praise and recognition for the fact that you've been talking about this problem for months and years before the mainstream even began to whisper it.
Yeah, well, they have begun to whisper it.
That's another really interesting fact.
I was the only one for a long time, and then suddenly, on the first day of 1999, everybody ran stories.
I mean, every network, CNN, everybody suddenly ran a Y2PA story.
It was amazing.
Right.
Well, we hope that it's not too little, too late.
And I'd like to mention, too, as your listeners hear all this, that they may feel like I did, as I started to learn about the potential gravity of what we're really up against, that I,
for one, and I assume that there are other people who feel as I do, I can't sit back helpless and passive and just leave it up to others and hope that all of this is going to work out and that they're always working to make sure that the outcome for me is going to be the one that's right for my family and neighbors.
And that's pretty much why I started to pay attention and to become active first, as I mentioned, gaining information about this problem and then trying to distribute that information to anybody who wants to.
All right.
Let's start with this.
Since we're talking about the media, why is the public not aware of what you've told us tonight about the power company plans?
MSNBC, certainly at least on their website, has provided some coverage to the Senate hearings last summer, and they identified in their story NERC.
I really like MSNBC, actually.
Right.
They've done an excellent job, I feel, compared to many of the other major media campaigns.
Unfortunately, they don't rise to the level of a Broca or a Jennings or whatever.
Right.
Yes, they just, that's true.
I don't think that they're as widely read or viewed.
And I think another possible problem is that most of the people within the industry itself are people that probably could come forward and talk about their experiences.
And they could come forward and say, hey, I'm a credible person.
If I might ask, when this report that you're referring to, though, that says it's under control, is that something that you saw in the last 24 hours?
Yeah, as a matter of fact, it is.
That's a reference to the auspicious event I referred to at the beginning of our discussion where NERC released the second annual report to DOE.
A 78-page report came out yesterday, the 11th, in which they basically stated that we have it under control.
They continued at the same time, though, under close reading, to say exactly the same things that I've been talking about, which I attribute to them.
I'm not almost everything that I have said during the last 90 minutes or so comes directly from the pages of their own recent publications.
And so you can see very easily that the concerns that I'm voicing sort of juxtaposed next to the idea that we have it under control seems to create a pretty clear disparity of views.
Well, what you have told us is worrisome enough.
Gary North, when he was on, went well beyond that.
And he said, and I can summarize it very quickly, that if everything goes wrong as he imagines it might, a worst-case scenario type deal, the power could go down and, for all practical purposes, not come back up again at all.
Now, he talks about lines of supply, fuel, and that sort of thing.
Correct.
Those are legitimate considerations.
They are?
Well, when you talk about supply, if the power was down long enough, the reserves that, like for instance, the coal burning generating facilities have could be theoretically exhausted.
And if the entire grid was down because of, let's say, the common mode failure scenario that I spoke of earlier, then in theory, at some point in time, The supplies could be used up before it's possible for the rest of the infrastructure, the truckers and the trains and so on and so forth, to resupply those kinds of facilities that need the coal and the other raw material.
I personally sincerely hope that we don't see that.
And according to the recent publication that was released yesterday, NERC is trying to reassure us specifically, for reasons that we can be fairly specific about, that that is a scenario that is on the edge of the bell-shaped curve of likely events.
In other words, it stands as a possibility that nobody can discount, and NERC does not discount any possibilities, but one which is relatively low in probability as we see it right now.
That's good.
I don't know to say that there aren't going to be some potential hardships, and it's not to say that it can't happen that way.
There could be common mode failures.
And I believe from reading the materials, what NERC is trying to do is say that they are going to, as we said earlier, find these parts to the greatest extent possible.
They won't find all of them, but they'll be continuously between now and June of 99 attempting to reduce the likely suspects so that if there were to be a failure, let's say, next Christmas, a serious failure in componentry, the place to look for those parts will be relatively limited in scope compared to the huge job that they would have if today was January 18th.
Even though this report, on the face of it, is pretty worrisome, do you think that we're being told, this is a subjective opinion type question, do you think we're being told the real truth, the absolute truth about what they think may occur?
You're going to have to read the between the lines to do that.
Well, you've done that.
We haven't.
So when you read between the lines, what do you think?
They are concerned that some of these efforts, you know, some of these efforts are not on track.
I think I said, I don't know if we did now, earlier in the show that, or you read in my letter on the air, that many of the companies have refused to participate in the plan.
How many?
Do you know?
Okay, this is an interesting story.
When the report was published on September 17th, following the initial assessment, only 75% of all entities reported.
So there are 200 bulk service providers and another 3,000 entities of different kinds that contribute in different ways.
3,200.
So if we're to go on their stated report, 800 or so of those 3,200 refused to participate at all as of September 17th.
Now, this is something they're proud of, though, because between September 17th and yesterday, through, they say, the process of peer pressure, and I submit due to forums like the one that you provide, and due to the fact that there must be some people who are aware and actively,
and when I say people, I mean in the public, who are actively concerned in our keeping somebody's feet to the fire, the percentage of participants has grown from, between September 17th and yesterday, from 75% to 98%.
It doesn't say that we can eliminate from our consciousness the possibility of common mode failure.
All right.
Part of the common mode failure is really scary, but part of also what people are curious about, and I am, and it may be out of your area of expertise, but some percentage of our electric power in the U.S. comes from nuclear power plants.
Correct.
They would be more, I would think, computer reliant than the power companies, the more traditional ones you've discussed.
Well, you are moving a little bit out of my area of focus.
I didn't choose when I got into this to examine the nuclear issue in the same way as I wanted to look generically at the issues confronting the grid.
I've heard figures that maybe 10 or 14 percent of our power comes from nuclear reactors.
Yes, I have seen those figures also.
And there is some reference to the readiness level of the nuclear facilities in the NERC report.
Although one of the reasons that I have thus far avoided tackling this issue in a comprehensive way is because the nuclear utilities are under the auspices of a separate government agency.
Correct, yes.
And so I do plan to look into that issue and to come up with a comprehensive solution.
I hope you do because I've heard some unsettling things about it.
Right.
Listen, we're coming toward the top of the hour, and there's a couple of things I want to do.
I want to ask you just one quick question.
What are you doing personally?
In other words, what preparations are you making for Stewart and Stewart's family in Tampa?
Okay, my concern is that there could be, and I don't know if we're going to have more time to talk about it, that we very well may look at the scenario of these isolated blackouts and brownouts.
And in fact, we lived through one here in Florida, and I very much wanted to tell the story about that for people who think it can't happen here.
Y'all, well, right.
We may not have the time right now to do that.
So just let me ask you, what are you doing personally?
What are you doing?
Okay, I think it's prudent.
I personally intend to make sure that, at the very least, that we have provisions on hand, let's say, on our property, to get us through what I believe, And this is my own opinion.
I'm not four or maybe five days of hardship at a time.
And I say this because I believe a couple of things based on the research that I've done.
One is that that's a long period of time to be in the dark based on the way that I see this evolving.
But also, I have chosen not to talk about this in great detail tonight, but I also have other lines of research which show that our state and probably most of the states in the country are planning to have emergency management crews on the street after a relatively short period of time if there should be some kind of a catastrophic breakdown.
Well, I do know the Canadian government is making tremendous preparation.
The situation in Canada, as I understand it, is that all leaves have been canceled for military personnel in Canada for several months surrounding the rollover date.
Correct.
And more and more we're hearing stories like that.
And I have, to be honest, contacted directly the project coordinator for the state of Florida for Y2K preparedness and had received significant materials from him about what the state of Florida is planning to do in coordination with FEMA.
And what is that?
Basically, as I said, I think that they feel that they are going to do everything that is possible within the joint resources of the Florida Emergency Management Agency and FEMA to provide whatever resources are necessary in order to sustain life for people if there should be a breakdown of our ability to get drinking water or a failure of electric cars.
All right, Stuart.
Hold on.
Hold it right there.
What I want to do is the following.
I am going to begin taking calls when we come back.
If you work for a power company, I want to hear from you.
Now, you need not identify yourself nor the company you work for.
I would just like to, I think I would like to get a feel for whether people generally agree with what they've been hearing this morning or whether they think it's all a bunch of hooey.
And what better people to hear from than people that work in power plants.
So again, all of my phone lines, please, everybody, just hang up.
Hang up the phone unless you work for a power company.
And if you do, I'll put you on the air anonymously.
You need not even say where you're calling from and what company you work for.
I don't want to know.
And I would appreciate your honest assessment.
I don't think that's ever been done on the air before.
And it seems to me with Stuart Rodman here, it would be a good time to do it.
Identify yourself, even by first name, location, or the company you work for.
And so I want to advise the listening audience that obviously with anonymous sources, you'll have to use your own reasoning and judgment with regard to what you're about to hear.
But all of my phone lines are now closed to everybody except power company employees.
It should be interesting.
Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, dateline Washington January 6th, 1999, FEMA officials are urging the emergency management, fire, and emergency services communities and the public to get ready now for Y2K.
Quote, it is very important that counties, municipalities, school districts, and other organizations that have not yet begun to work on Y2K issues start now, end quote.
FEMA Deputy Director Mike Walker said, while some failures will be minor annoyances, there may be some that have more serious consequences.
The Y2K issue is worldwide and refers to electronic and computer system problems that may occur because of the inability of date-sensitive devices to compute 2000 when systems moved from 1999 to the year 2000 or Y2K.
Virtually all systems, listen now, that rely on computers or electronic devices that refer to date and time may be affected by Y2K in one way or another.
This includes power, dispatch, and communication systems, 911 systems, microcomputers, and much more.
It goes on from there.
That is the government's own recently posted advice.
And once again, here is Stuart H. Rodman.
Stuart, we've got a lot of power company employees on the phone, but you wanted to relate a personal story.
Yes, thank you.
Yes, I do.
I think that it has significance for all of us.
Here in Florida, in the Tampa Bay area, which is where I'm at, in the Christmas holiday of 1989, we experienced an event that affected literally millions of us here, which I think is pretty much a precursor, in my view, of the kind of scenario that I've been describing.
Maybe a mild form of it, but it was real, and it happened, and it did affect a lot of us at exactly the time Of year that we're talking about.
And what happened on Christmas Eve of that year, 1989, the temperature fell to 17 degrees Fahrenheit at Tampa International Airport, which still today stands as a record low.
Oh, I remember, yes.
Were you in the area at that time?
No, I just remember the reports.
As it turned out, you may well remember that anyway, because as an added bit of bad luck, that was part of a deep freeze that gripped virtually the entire nation during that time, which is in part why we had the problems that we did have.
But at any rate, and probably because of the cold, not only here but around the country, the other areas of the country were using their generating capacity at near peak levels.
And prior to the time that we really hit the cold wave, we seem to be the last ones.
It seems the cold weather moves generally speaking from the north to the south.
Sure.
And so these people were already in the grips of it in the other parts of the nation.
And so they were already making these transfers that we spoke about and pretty much had used up the available capacity that otherwise would have been able to be used to help residents here in Tampa who are just not accustomed to that kind of weather.
So we here in this area just decided, of course, as people would, to turn up the thermostats.
And we were all shocked at what actually happened.
What happened?
Well, instead of actually getting more heat, we actually wound up getting less.
We experienced the exact scenario that we spoke about earlier tonight when we discussed the practices involved in the generating capacity planning stages.
We were unable, by planning, and I should probably sort out just a little bit if I can, I want to mention that if you think back a few moments ago, we talked about how NERC in the electric power industry believes that their plan to ration power during the upcoming Christmas holidays,
that's prior to the Millennium Day, is well-founded in part because statistics show, believe this or not, and I was surprised, frankly, statistics show that demand for power is low during the holiday period.
And I guess this is attributed to the fact that industries, for the most part, are working at skeletal levels or people are off.
And actually, according to NERC, the statistics show that demand is almost at an annual low during Christmas and into New Year's.
And so they're thinking, well, if we have this rationing plan, people probably will have a lower likelihood of needing to have power transferred into their municipalities because their demand is going to be low.
So it's more likely that the local utilities will be able to meet that demand.
Well, that's what they thought in 1989.
And we live in Florida, which is a relatively mild place.
Sure.
Well, it hit 17 degrees and people reacted.
And because of, at that time, some bad luck and maybe some complacency, the electric companies here at that time, at any rate, did not even have their normal capacity available.
And they had two major power stations down offline by design for maintenance purposes because they figured this would be a period here where it's unlikely that it would be needed.
And in the unlikely event that it would, we would get.
They weren't ready for that kind of weather already.
Already.
And because of the fact that the excess capacity around the nation was already accounted for by other cities that had made previous commitments to take it.
You couldn't do it.
We did not left it.
So on Christmas Eve, we were told on maybe 15 minutes' notice that our power was going to be turned off, and it would be turned off deliberately for everybody.
And it would be turned off for about two hours, which time it would then again be turned on for about an hour, and it would then be turned off.
Wow, this was for all of Tampa?
Yes, and actually not only Tampa, the entirety of Hillsborough County, Pinellas County, and Pascoe County.
So we're talking about an area that affected several million people.
And I know you're a cat lover, so you might appreciate this.
At 10 o'clock at night, when we finally took the turkey out of the oven, we decided that after a rough sampling it, that probably the only person being in our home that would really appreciate it was the cat.
What I'm hearing at work, though, especially on the institutional side and industrial side, is they're telling municipalities to start buying some industrial-sized diesel-powered generators.
I don't know if you recall, there was that great Eastern Freeze that happened in Ontario.
You mean they're telling individual towns and municipalities buy generators?
unidentified
Yeah, because what's happened is some large municipalities, city-sized places like Toronto, Montreal, really haven't done much about compliance.
And they control the local power companies.
For instance, there's like a Toronto Hydro or a regional hydro or Vancouver Hydro.
And they buy it off the provincial power companies.
And there hasn't been a lot of coordination in between, it seems.
So I guess as an emergency measure, they're telling you to do this.
But we're being told to tell people not to panic.
They just might have intermittent losses of power.
But from what I understand, it could resemble what happened in the Eastern Freeze, which happened for different reasons, but lasted in some cases up to eight weeks.
So there's a man who's saying, look, the inside, the industry talk is that it could go for several weeks, that there could be, in Canada, for example, millions of people without power.
And they know, because they did, they went like seven or eight weeks without power in some places.
So they're saying that could happen there.
Interesting.
Do you have much communication, Stuart, with the power company employees?
Not as much as I would like.
And this is really important because most of the things that we're hearing are, including the reports, of course, that are going to the Department of Energy, are being prepared by the management personnel in these electric companies.
Understandably, they're the ones that have the bulk statistics and data.
I think a lot of people that we're liable to hear from this morning are mid-level people or even line people.
I very much want to hear from them.
I believe that what we're really looking at here is a situation where over the period of several decades, we have moved rapidly in the electric power industry into automation.
And we, as the public, encourage this for obvious reasons.
Of course, by having automated black boxes instead of human technicians, the cloud is producing that power.
And I had a chance to look over some paperwork while I was on hold, and actually eight out of 22 of our last sales have been either to Florida Power and Light executives or to the Keys Power Cooperative.
No kidding.
One of them was a lineman, not an executive, or their immediate family.
I have very little doubt that across the country, including people in Florida, that we will and we should prepare for the likelihood of a scenario at the very least.
If there are no Y2K-related failures, if there are none, we should be preparing ourselves for some period of disruption.
The clear implication of what this man has said to us is that people who are really in the know, executives who run power companies, are ordering solar power for their own homes.
Now, that sort of carries a message with it, if it's true.
As far as the comment goes, what I'd like to say is that I am aware that at least some major power companies are seeking legal opinions as to the extent of their liability due to a Y2K power outage.
As we've heard tonight, a lot of these companies are connected to the grid, and it might be a third-party company that has a Y2K problem that causes the power outage.
Or it might be another third-party issue, for example, is something like a hospital, which I would suppose, and I know I'm sure most do, have alternate power supplies.
unidentified
What do those power supplies cover?
How long do they last?
Should that hospital have realized the problem and prepared for it in advance?
And this also would play into other large industries.
Yes, I saw some guesstimates by MSNBC when they were covering the Senate hearings with Senators Bennett and Dodd last summer.
And MSNBC was estimating, based on testimony, that the cost of litigation potentially at that time, if intervention was not undertaken, could exceed $1 trillion.
$1 trillion.
All right.
You've got a minimal website up, and I should tell the audience that we've got a link to it if you want to read more about this.
Stuart Rodman's website is available by going to my website, www.artdoll.com.
Scroll down to the name Stuart H. Rodman, click on it, and you will go to his website.
Also, by the way, don't forget, take a look at Arts Hole.
That's right, Arts Hole.
It's a new photograph I've put on the website as of tonight.
There is no explanation to go with it.
That will be forthcoming eventually.
Anything like that?
Well, my best advice right now for people that would like to contact me directly or if they would like to contribute some other ideas or news is to visit the website that we have linked to your site, and there is an email link there.
Okay, so they can send you email.
Right, and they may notice on that site, which I do intend to update periodically and add additional links to.
We're using this day as an opportunity to launch Operation NERCWAS.
NERCWAS, right?
Operation NERCWACH.
And there's a link to that on my website.
And basically, the idea there is not to look over anybody's shoulder.
But I'm hoping that people who are listening to the show and others, they want to contribute information from their own local communities to a central source like Operation Nerdwatch, where we can then on the web make available news as it breaks from isolated areas around the country perhaps, where otherwise these people would not have a central place to...
Correct, exactly.
All right, makes sense to me.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Stuart Rodman and Art Bell.
High.
Hello.
Hello.
Yes.
You are a power company employee, sir?
Yes.
Okay.
unidentified
I was talking to you about the old cobalt language the computer systems of the older model computers had.
You know, for saving RAM space is what they use that for.
A lot of the computer systems that I work with, the control systems, they've been converted over.
That doesn't mean that there's not a problem in the system because there's still a lot of equipment out there that is not Y2K compliant.
So you have a complication of things where some of your systems are not ready and you're going to have weather and demand that are going to impact the power and that's what we've been hearing is that's why we're talking about in our particular system for controlling people's power.
I live in a rural community outside the municipality that I work in, and I have a shallow well and a septic tank, but even to run a one and a half horse motor, I have to have a 6kW generator.
I see a lot of people buying 3,000 watt or 4,000 watt at the hardware stores, and they're even on back order now.
Now, I want to talk to you a little bit about a lot of people don't understand in the hydro thing where these water sheds are actually controlled from.
They're actually controlled by computer on flow and level from a site in Arlington, Virginia.
Now, as far as distribution, let me explain, since 1974, all of the line load balancing has been done by computers.
To actually do that by hand anymore would mean that we would have to have a person who, and a lot of these people who even know how to do that no longer work for the utilities.
So we're looking at a serious problem.
And I am amazed that people don't address it.
Also, I'd encourage some other upper management people to perhaps tell you what we're actually facing as far as our risk management liability insurance rates.
We're paying as much as $177,000 a month now for our insurance.
So you're telling me that when the power, if the power were to go down, as in a massive area failure, the companies could no longer communicate?
unidentified
That's right.
Now, a lot of the facilities we have for controlling, we use microwave and satellite linkages, and if those go down, which is also a possibility, basically in the trade shows I've been to, I hate to tell you this, but it sticks it once it fails because we can't find where all these boxes are.
And that doesn't encourage you any, but distribution is our biggest problem.
I also would encourage you to maybe have people take a look at some of the other sites around on the web.
There was a memo, it's a protocol from Great Britain that leaked out from the United Nations protocol sessions they've had about government confiscation of all manufacturing of power and distribution of power.
And you can quite readily see that has a lot of us concerned in the private sector.
Stuart, do you get this kind of information normally?
Or do people generally not want to talk?
I'm fortunate to get somebody firsthand that has the kind of information that this gentleman has been sharing.
In general, I would say that fortunately, you granted this person anonymity.
I believe that most of the people that are employed within the power companies right now would probably be ill-advised to go public with their knowledge.
I believe that most of the communication that's coming out of the power companies is coming through NERC.
Well, the hell with ill-advised, I want to know what's really going on.
I don't want it soft-pedaled.
I want to really know what's going on.
And if I say it's going to power company employees, I wouldn't advise them to keep their mouths shut.
I'd advise them to tell what they know if it's the truth.
Absolutely.
And it's a great thing that we're able to start hearing from the people tonight as we are.
And it's interesting, that last caller that you were just speaking with, I have to say that the things that he was saying is very closely corroborated in the information that has been published.
And I think he's just right on with the things that he's been saying.
All right.
Wild Cardline, you're on the air with Stuart, H. Rodman, and Art Bell.
And I'll just tell you one quick thing I picked up out of a meeting down at Phoenix Was that one of our operations people said in the event of a big YGK problem, one of their plans, excuse me, I'm a little nervous.
One of their plans was to go through and physically remove the umbilical cord from the 12 KV breakers as far as distribution so they were not connected to any computers at all and manually close them.
Now, a lot of what you're talking about, our company started, well, our power station started two and a half years ago looking at this YK2000 problem.
Right.
And of course, our nuclear station is an older station.
So a lot of the equipment in there, you know, required that, you know, investigation, you know, because they're just about everything you've got some kind of computer chip in it.
So now, here in the last year and a half, they've been changing a lot of the older equipment to upgrading the electronics in it to make it comply with what y'all have been talking about.
Now, as a company as a whole, our company actually sends out a newsletter, comes out maybe once every two or three months on what the situation is with YK2000 as far as the company is concerned.
And right now, pretty much, you know, we've seen some advancements from the nuclear stations to where we've been getting rid of all these, what they call, we call the dump terminals or mainframes.
Right.
And upgrading to the new piece, going to the PC base operation.
Our communication system has also been upgraded to the point where, you know, we don't, our company itself, we actually have our own communication system throughout the state to, you know, bypass into the local phone companies in order to ensure that we can get through when the times are necessary.
Now, as far as the company goes, as far as WAT, they just opened a new distribution center in our capital city, in our state, which is now Wyatt 2,000 compliance.
They control, from there, they can control everything from the western part of the mid-part of the state all the way down to the seacoast.
And then plus two, they have another center located in town across the bay here from where I live that also has just come online with all new equipment.
Well, are you at all shocked by hearing from the other power company employees with respect to what they've heard and the fact that their management's all going out and buying generators and stuff?
Now, we're in a process here, but we don't see, we're not be, we won't be in full deregulation until probably year 2005.
But the thing of it is, a lot of these utilities, you know, because of this, you know, either the smaller utilities who are not going to be able to compete out there in the world of big business have more or less been absorbed by the larger utilities.
Yep.
And then, plus you go up north and you look up there, I mean, you've got a lot of your, a lot of your nuclear stations, you know, people are not, you know, they're closed, they're shutting them down, or either they're out because the NRC took them out of service.
I've heard that there are quite a number that are going to have to shut down.
And speaking of shutting down, Stuart, it really has been a pleasure having you on the air with us.
And we'll have you back.
I think this is one of those things where during the year, as the year goes on, we're going to begin gathering information.
It's like tonight, the calls you just heard, you're going to get a gazillion emails like that as a result of the broadcast, and you're going to collect a lot more information.
And I'm sorry that we have to be collecting information on our own, and we can't necessarily depend on what we hear from others.
But I'm all for doing that and getting out whatever the truth really is.
Well, Art, I certainly want to thank you very much for having me on the show tonight.
And as I said at the beginning, I think that you provide a unique and very important forum for ideas that otherwise, in information which just doesn't seem to otherwise be getting out as quickly as it ought to.
And I also would like to thank you for the opportunity to hear from the callers that we've been hearing from over the last few minutes.
I try to keep a certain component of open lines in every program.
Mostly the first and final hours, but occasionally an entire program.
So actually, there's going to be more of that.
I'm kind of in an open line mood.
But I do have some interesting guest schedule.
Tomorrow night, Matthew Alper, he's one of my favorites.
I find what he has to say to be so mentally challenging, so challenging to traditional belief systems, that it's just, it's a real pleasure.
And the way he presents his material is really special.
And tomorrow night, he's got a lot of new material, new angles.
He wrote a book called The God Part of the Brain.
And it's a real challenging book.
Then next week, I've already booked The Chief of the Entire Lakota Nation.
And that's a really rare one.
So you're definitely going to want to be on hand for that.
And otherwise, we sort of just let it come as it comes.
Now, I think the last several hours have been...
And particularly...
That they believe that there's real problems ahead.
Very unnerving, and I imagine you'll hear probably more of that this hour, but we are now going into open lines, and you're welcome to react to what you heard.
Maybe you think it's all a bunch of baloney.
Maybe you don't.
Maybe you're preparing.
Maybe you're not.
It'll be kind of fun to hear from the general public, and that's what's coming up next.
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Look at the guest that you had on tonight about the power grid.
Yes.
Very interesting topic.
You bet it's some very good points.
And one of the things that was mentioned is some reference made to what was going on up in Canada.
Last winter we had that major ice storm down in Ottawa and in Quebec and Montreal especially was a good example of what can actually happen.
And just going on further than that, the Y2K problem in general as to what you have on your show, I kind of think that in a way it's a bit of a, not as much as a cover-up, but as a bit of a screen for something that seems to be a lot bigger.
And the reason why I say that, I find it rather amazing that power companies, banks, government have all been alerted to this problem for at least the last 10 years, at the least.
And they seem to be the last ones to have done anything about it.
Well, the story that I've heard, and that's all I can really pass along is what I've heard, is that People who work in companies and program computers have known, of course, about the Y2K bug for a long time.
But it is reasonable to assume what I've heard, and it is as follows: and that is that, look, if you were, let's say, in your 15th or 18th year or 20th year as a power company employee, or an employee that was working with computer programming in a large corporation,
as a mid-level employee, the last thing you would do is go to your boss and tell your boss that there is a problem that is so large that it's going to take most of the profits of the next several quarters that the company might report to fix it.
You're not likely going to go tell your boss that because that's the last thing they want to hear, and you might well be out of a job, so you keep your mouth shut, and that's what I'm told has occurred.
You have to be careful, of course, what you store and how you store it, because one of the worst things that could happen, obviously, in any emergency situation is that you would have some stored food and you would eat it and get sick.
And the last thing you want to do is get sick during an otherwise serious emergency that wouldn't allow people to get to you to help.
So you have to be careful, but his advice is good and sound.
He's taken and liquidating a lot of his assets to where he has cash money.
He doesn't trust the banks.
And my cousin's a person that's got both feet firmly on the ground and doesn't react to things like this, you know, that weren't serious unless they are serious.
And he's scared.
And it's kind of disheartening and frightening, as you say.
Okay, well, let me pass this on to you and everybody else.
What I'm telling you is close to right, if not correct.
CNN did a survey that they've been airing over the last several days in which 53% of the American people, a slight majority, say they will not go to the bank and withdraw extra money.
And I'm pretty sure I'm correct when I say 47% of the people will go and Get extra money.
And I'm not sure what that means in terms of what the banks face, but if 47% of the American people go to the bank to get cash, extra money, to have on hand for whatever may or may not happen, 47%, what will that do?
I suppose you could try and come up with some sort of average amount that people would withdraw.
And then try and project whether the banks actually could handle that or not.
But I think that's a worrisome figure.
If that survey is accurate, I think 47% is a pretty worrisome figure.
I believe that all of our preparations and all of the problems that people are preparing for are real, and I think that we need to do that.
But when they mention that gigantic machinery, such as a generator or a crane that would lift food from a boat, let's say, to a truck, or operate, like I said, elevators or anything big, and if it's dependent upon a thumbnail-sized microchip that is hard-programmed,
I believe that, yes, it could shut us down, but I don't believe that any red-blooded American who is intuitive and who is a technocrat, as I believe a lot of your listeners are, would sit by and see this equipment totally disabled without doing something as simple as a jumper wire.
Now, I've seen it after Hurricane Andrew in South Florida.
A lot of equipment, especially traffic signal devices, would not operate because they couldn't talk to their central computer, but they could work on their own.
And it took them a while to realize this, but then that's when the emergency resources of people's imagination start kicking in, and they start saying, look, this motor wants to work, and this microchip's not going to let it.
First of all, the Australian government doesn't seem to be doing very much about the Y2K situation.
However, people in Australia have noted with interest that the British government is mobilising their forces in December for some strange reason, and that again in the United States and also Canada.
Major exercises in the United States, I understand, are going to be tested in May this year for a massive mobilisation for a Y2K trial.
I think that you'll find that our About half out of Canada.
Right.
And 18 million, actually.
And if you look at the power grid system and the infrastructure system in this country, it wouldn't take a lot of people to resurrect the system that went down, especially that we are somewhat advanced in many areas, but also they have manual overrides and they still have the old system in place so that they can quickly re-establish the infrastructure.
That's the word.
And so there we have an interesting scenario for Australia.
So it appears that the Australian government is not really concerned about it at all.
Of course, Australia has suffered in certain portions of Australia gigantic long-term power outages.
Wasn't there a big problem in Perth?
unidentified
Yes, there has been power outages there, but Australians are used to power outages.
We're a fairly versatile sort of population.
We come from a descendancy from hard times.
Our forefathers came to this country and we had to learn to make our own things.
So we're much more apt at making and applying our minds and hands to getting on with life than, say, a more advanced civilization or whatever, such as the United States, who's more reliant upon the infrastructure.
Australians really aren't that reliant.
We're not that centralized.
So you probably have a completely different mindset here.
And I think you'll probably find a lot of people who would clap their hands in great laughter if the system went down.
Listen, I appreciate your report, but there wouldn't be a lot of people laughing here if the system goes down, as you put it.
In other words, we have millions and millions and millions of people who live in cities, and they depend on the light going on when the switch is turned.
They depend on water coming out of the tap when they wish it to.
They depend on a lot of things that the infrastructure provides happening.
And if they don't happen, there's not a hell of a lot of reserve for a lot of people in the cities.
I mean, if you live on the 20th floor of an apartment building and you go over and turn on the tap and no water comes out, you're pretty much in trouble right away.
Particularly if you have not planned.
If something's coming along in the way and the power is not there, you're in trouble pretty much right away.
I do certainly see what you're saying about Australia, though, and Australians in general, being more prepared for adversity.
And of course, there were, there were thousands and even millions of people without power, hundreds of thousands, certainly, in Australia for a protracted period of time.
And they did okay.
I'm Art Bell.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
Coast to Coast AM KNCO Grass Valley, a service of Nevada County broadcasters in our 20th year of broadcast excellence.
Here I am, and here's an interesting piece of the email.
Hey, Art, you used to be a dispatcher for a police department.
That's true.
Did you notice that many cops had little faith in their own department to stop criminals and took measures to protect themselves and their families?
They knew better.
The utility workers are no different.
I'm afraid that really is true.
And most of the cops that I knew, and I knew a lot of them, all had their own protective measures.
I mean, besides the fact that a cop carries a gun anyway, with respect to crime, they took their own measures, as you should.
And I've said this on the air a million times, particularly if you live in an outlying area, the police may arrive in time, if you don't protect yourself, to draw a nice little chalk line around your body.
You've seen those in movies, right?
Well, that doesn't do you a hell of a lot of good.
And so you really, the police do all they can, and believe me, they do a lot.
And really, I guess I'm calling for information more than anything else.
Getting the generator is one thing, and I think it's great because I'm preparing for this.
I think it's a real, real, could be a real disaster if we don't.
But even if we have generators and can get a hold of them, how can we stabilize the fuel or keep enough fuel safe, you know, in a safe way that we're not...
And I've looked at different types of units, but of course, what I get, I don't want to blow up my house doing it.
You know, that's not an option at this point.
And so I was just trying to find out if somebody else had maybe an idea how to stabilize the fuel because you get enough quantity to keep you going for 30 or 60 days, and you've got a lot of fuel.
You know, my question for you is, with this Y2K thing happening, are we talking about a total economic shutdown as far as all the businesses and everything would go?
Anyhow, my other question for you is, do you have a list on your website then that I can print up some of the items, maybe is it by manufacturer names of the items that would store over a long period of time better than others?
Well, we have some sponsors that sell that kind of equipment and product, you know, storable food, radios that carry their own power.
Yeah, I've heard about a sort of thing.
Flashlights that work 20 times longer than others, that sort of thing.
But no official list.
We'll be getting one, I'm sure.
And we're going to just keep, I'm going to continue to explore these areas until I figure out how real, and it's going to kind of unfold as the year goes on.
We still have the Second Amendment in this country, and you're allowed to have guns, and I have guns.
They're the last thing that you would ever want to have to use.
I mean, the last thing.
I think the best thing that everybody can do locally, if you're aware that there is going to be a problem, one way to keep from having to use the last line of defense is to go and begin making people in your community aware that there may be a problem and that people shouldn't panic,
or they should quietly prepare for a period of disruption.
And that's your best defense.
In other words, if your neighbors, left, right, forward, rear, and around you are prepared, you are less likely to have to deal with the neighbor who wants what you have.
Does that make sense?
I hope so.
Most of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
unidentified
Oh, thank you.
I'm Charles on Kawhi, and I have the Open Energy Chip.
And your basic question is how would it be possible to make you a toy that would create energy from cheap, or run from cheap energy?
What I have said is the people who claim to have free power, free energy, I request of them to produce, at the very least, a toy that demonstrates over unity, which means more power is produced to propel the toy than is inputted to the toy.
unidentified
So this thing would, my chip would start in a vessel of tepid oil, and it would make electricity.
But it would cost $20,000 to use gum money to make it.
If you put smart money with scientists, the nano chip fabricators, they can make it for cheaper than that, but they hate the idea because it violates the laws of science.
Look, think of the millions of channels that would be available once there's enough bandwidth.
unidentified
Well, yeah, I look at it this way.
We're just happy that one of the phone companies, the big phone company is up here, just got a new fiber optics cable in between Seattle and Anchorage.
You know, one of the reasons I work nights, it's not just so I can get work done.
It's so I can listen to your programming.
I like your show.
I mean, it's just, some of it's too outrageous to believe, but the stuff like Y2K, I work with computers all day long, And most people just don't realize how much is going to be affected.
I mean, it's going to be, they can't go to a restaurant and run their credit card because their cash machines aren't going to work.
These POS point-of-sale systems ain't going to work.
I know.
They ain't even started talking about thinking of fixing the programming on those little things.
It depends on radio stations being able to continue to broadcast.
That's an awful lot.
That's an awful lot of electronics that has to work right to get from here to there.
Now, I am making some contingency plans, which I'm not going to discuss right now.
So I'm sorry I teased you with that.
There are some things that I'm beginning to think about and do to try and keep the lines of communications open if something does occur, but that's for another day.
Have you had anyone, obviously I don't catch all your shows, but have you had someone that's maybe put together some of the connection between the Masons and the Knights Templar?
It's, you know, obviously there's something that's impossible to prove since this happened in the early 1300s, but it's my contention that there's a fair amount of crossover between the Knights Templar and the early Masons.
Reasonable to presume, I think, yes.
And at that point, the orders to excommunicate the Knights Templar and to seize their assets, property, etc., etc., was done by Pope Clement V, who was basically a puppet pope set up by Philip IV of France, who'd been one of his cardinals, at which point the papacy was moved from Rome to Avignon, France.
So a lot of that has to do with, I think, part of the original enmity was in that this was basically orchestrated by some less than noble figures in the Catholic Church and the noble houses of Europe.
It's my contention, personal belief, that some of the early Masons were, like I said, very much involved with the Knights Templar, and that it's kind of a way of staying underground, per se, they had to pretty much do some of the things they did as far as being a little secret.
And also, part of it is one of the reasons that Catholics have a bit of a problem with being in the fraternity is that obviously to those outside the fraternity, you cannot disclose such items as what goes on in the lodge room, means of recognition, and so forth.
And for a good Catholic person, you're not supposed to have any type of things that you cannot convey with your father confessor.
Gotcha.
All right.
Thank you very much for the call.
Well, that may be true.
Then again, there may be a larger secret that we don't know about.