Phone guests, Ken Cohn (Pepco) and James Robey (Howard County Executive)
Subject: How did Y2K go?
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Elaine: Happy New Year everybody…I’m so thrilled that I was able to let the water out of my bathtub this morning…the fact that I’m on well water, made me say…just in case let’s fill up that bathtub…nice to pull that plug…Happy New Year, Don McAndrews!
Don: Happy New Year!
Elaine: What do you think, Don? You read the paper...emergency crews sent home after New Years fears fizzle…you can’t win…
Don: True…people saying, "Look at all the money spent for nothing…" But if anything had happened…
Elaine: "We spent all this money…"
Don: "Didn’t get us what it was supposed to get…"
Elaine: Speaking of emergency crews…I’ve asked a couple of special people to be with me…Ken Cohn, the Vice President of PEPCO…on line…Jim Robey will be joining us after awhile…he’s the Howard County Executive…Happy New Year, Ken!
Cohn: Thank you, Elaine, same to you…
Elaine: You’re happy that everything fizzled…
Cohn: Yes…we didn’t expect any major problems and we didn’t have any…
Elaine: That’s great…you say nothing major…are you really telling us…look at the Pentagon…they didn’t tell us there was a computer failure, either…
Cohn: In our business, if there were any major problems, folk would know…in fact, I am telling you correctly…didn’t have any major problems and don’t expect to have any…
Don: Were there any minor glitches…any you had to go out and correct?
Cohn: Not in terms of any of our critical electric delivery systems…we’re still running tests on our vast computer systems…
Don: Hey, if you screw up on our billing we don’t care about that so much…
Elaine: In Bend, Oregon…someone had gone out and vandalized one of their towers…
Cohn: Certainly was a concern…there had been talk about terrorist activities, potential disruptions and so forth…we took what were prudent precautions…we did not experience any of that here at Pepco…
Elaine: Are we also a little early to let our guard down…what will be the next…
Cohn: In terms of security we always try to maintain proper level of security…in terms of Y2K in general, there are several other concerns…we don’t foresee problems because we had most of our folks working over the weekend...there are other dates in our calendar year that we have to be aware of…leap day coming up on February 29th…we programmed an tested for that as well…
Elaine: I want to go inside Pepco’s center…what did you guys do? Did you have to give feedback to the government? Were you getting feedback from around your area?
Cohn: Yes to both of those questions…contact with local government agencies…we had Pepco personnel located at the emergency centers in the District of Columbia, Montgomery and Prince Georges Counties…backup communications equipment, in case something happened…in constant contact with them…reporting both to the Maryland Public Service Commission and the DC Public Service Commission…we were getting reports in from our own crews…people out in the field checking…especially after midnight…those reports came into our command center for the first hour after midnight…
Elaine: …watching television to see what would happen…were you doing any of that other than monitoring?
Cohn: Our Chief Executive Officer, John Derrick was at the command center…he was the executive in command…he held hourly briefings from the time we activated our command center which was at 6 p.m. on the 31st…reports from each of our major sectors…generation, transmission and distribution as well as our own internal information technology infrastructure…those reports were provided to him by representatives of business units who were in contact with the people for instance, who are at out major power plants…actually working our power plants from our transmission and distribution folks out in the field…computer services…also out in the field…
Elaine: Were you surprised everything went so smoothly?
Cohn: We were prepared…been preparing since 1995…of course, we were happy and relieved…during the day reports had come in from the rest of the world…that bolstered us a little bit…made us feel a little more comfortable…
Don: You still had that nagging doubt and fear that something was overlooked…
Cohn: That’s true because there were a lot of items, a lot of systems, inventory that we had to check…when midnight passed and 1 o’clock went by, we did feel a lot better…
Elaine: What time did you finally get home?
Cohn: About 4 o’clock…
Don: I was partying and I got home sooner than that!
Elaine: So you missed all the festivities downtown…
Cohn: Other than what we saw on the monitor…looked like folks were having a good time…
Elaine: Sure did…do you think the crown was held back a bit from joining…fearful?
Cohn: That might have been the case…so many reports of potential problems…terrorist activities…held the crown down a bit…on the other hand, the weather was so good…
Elaine: Our neighbors invited us to go with them to the Mall…such an exciting day and evening to watch what was happening around the world…are we in any way connected…in an international way…grids for electricity…
Cohn: The United States has three electrical grids…all of the utilities east of the Rockies are connected in one grid and those utilities west of the Rockies are a separate grid and for reasons you can figure out, Texas is its own grid…we are definitely interconnected with all of the utilities along the East Coast and inland as far as the Rockies and all of the utilities in this country had their Y2K work monitored by the North American Electric Utility Committee as well as the U.S. Department of Energy and we had required reports that we submitted…we all felt pretty comfortable with all the activities the other utilities were undertaking…
Elaine: In other words, if something had happened in Canada, would we have impacted by that?
Cohn: It’s possible…but there are a lot of protections that have been built in to the electrical grid since the blackouts that we’ve had…such an incident in fairly unlikely…
Elaine: This little article about Oregon…the tower supported lines carried the electricity from the Pacific Northwest to California, but somehow they were able to switch the loads when vandals got to the lines…that’s what you would have been able to do…I’m so intrigued…we’re so independent in a sense because we’re able to quickly monitor…thrilled that we had no glitches…but I wonder how many calls you’re going to get…"I’m going to return my generator and you’re the reason!"
Cohn: We’ve gone out and spoken to many, many civic associations, church groups…recommend in terms of Y2K preparedness…
Elaine: Can you hold that thought? See the line blinking…Jim Robey’s going to join us…take a break…Y2K, what didn’t happen…
Don: Like to hear your stories…
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Elaine: Yes, I am back…I have Ken Cohn from Pepco on the line talking about the event that essentially didn’t happen…the big non-event…we’ve had Jim Robey joins us, the Howard County Executive…Happy New Year…how are you?
Robey: Happy New Year to you…doing’ great…doin’ fine…
Elaine: Did you get home in time to celebrate with your wife?
Robey: She was asleep…went out to dinner last night…I don’t think fizzled at all…worked out very well…speaking from local government…all the planning, all of the preparation produced the fizzle event…while we expected the outcome to be what it was, there’s always that uncertainty…just as Pepco, BGE and everyone was…
Elaine: Damned if you do and damned if you don’t…you bought lot of generators, right Jim?
Jim: We bought seven generators to have at key intersections in case the power went out….those will be used in case we have an ice storm…a major snowstorm…we’ve got everything lines up…hook ‘em up…
Elaine: Ken, when we went off the air you were talking about how you went about helping everyone to prepare for this…
Cohn: You need to prepare to your own comfort level…prepared for any kind of winter or summer storm…flashlights, batteries and so forth…Y2K would be no different…we certainly were not recommending generators, but if that’s something that folks felt comfortable…went out and got them…same with food and water…we simply said, be prepared to your own comfort level as you would be for a short duration storm…
Elaine: I can recall…if everything’s okay, why are they saying…you should get ready in case…
Cohn: Even on a nice day like today Pepco can’t guarantee electric service…our reliability rate is 99.99+%, but when ice storms hit or thunderstorms hit, there will be outages and there’s nothing we can do to guarantee service 100% of the time…
Don: With the complexities of your systems you’re always going to have surprise outages…you can’t guarantee
Elaine: Jim, remember about the middle of January last year…
Robey: How well I remember…
Elaine: Ken, you won’t forget that either…let me ask you, Jim…what do you think you did in Howard County that going to make this year 2000 everything go well…
Robey: We have to go through Monday and then the 29th…not expecting anything on either of those days…what we did…updated all of our equipment to make sure it was Y2K compliant…we had a lot of very old computers…
children wouldn’t even play with them…they’ve all been replaced…educated the public on what they could do to become more self-sufficient…if there is a power outage, if the phone service goes out…I think a lot of people learned from that…a reporter asked about 1 a.m. in the emergency operations center, "What did you do to prepare for this?" I said, "Nothing." Because I was already prepared…flashlights, batteries, some food, and we have logs for the fireplace…don’t have a generator, don’t have kerosene heaters…as Ken said, if people had the need…it wasn’t for me…I was concerned if it was an event, I was ready, if it wasn’t, nothing had changed in my life…we also educated our employees in county government how to prepare basically, for a catastrophic disaster should it have occurred…which we were sure it wouldn’t…emergency operations center was upgraded…we tested all of our power systems in the county…wasn’t necessary, but made it better should an event occur in the future…
Elaine: I felt, as I was watching festivities…public television did an excellent job showing what was going on around the world…coming out of this…sort of a partnership…together everyone made this not a real problem…am I wrong, Ken?
Cohn: Absolutely right…information sharing within the electric utility industry within the energy sector in general…between Pepco and the jurisdictions within which we do business…very hospitable, cooperative environment…
Elaine: Jim…why just have this occur only when there’s a crisis…isn’t there is something we have learned…together we can do so much…
Robey: I think we have always…this brought us closer than ever…year ago put a hard focused teamed together…Y2K issues…involved power companies, phone companies, hospitals, various community associations, state government, county government…folks who supply the water to Howard County…worked together as a team for perhaps a year…tremendous partnership and teamwork…nothing happened…
Elaine: This idea of fizzle was fine with me…taught the dependence I have on electricity…I can’t change that…also have a lot of respect for everybody that worked on this problem…without panicking the citizens, went about, with a lot of criticism…anyone sitting there saying it was a lot of hype…so glad they are able to say it now…
Robey: Community meetings we had…some people said we were trying to scare them…just the opposite…information to make the best decision…people who screamed at me that it’s part of a conspiracy…they were so far off base…now look ahead to the year 2000 and do some great things…
Elaine: Do you want to make a prediction as to where we’re going…computers run a lot of our lives…
Robey: I’m afraid to make predictions…computers play a big part in our lives, but there’s the human element that controls the computers…if computers had run their course, we wouldn’t be talking today…human intervention that made all the corrections…computers working for us and not us working for them…
Elaine: Very good point…now Ken you’ve got something coming up…experimental year…you’re not going to be the only ones providing the power now…
Cohn: That’s true…we’ll be moving toward customer choice in Maryland and as of last week we got approval from the District of Columbia Public Service Commission as well as Maryland to sell our generating plants…looking to do that…Pepco will be getting out of the generation business…
Elaine: I’d like to thank both Jim, Jim Robey, the Howard County Executive for having spent some time…go wine and dine your beautiful wife…
Robey: Actually I’m going to sneak back into church right now…just ducked out to call you…
Elaine: Ken, I’d like to thank you for taking time…you go and celebrate…
Cohn: Thank you, Elaine, have a healthy, happy new year…
Elaine: Thank you so much…
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Elaine: Welcome back to HOME INNOVATIONS being brought to you by Cabinet Discounters…want to remind you if you’d like to learn a little more about us, call 1-800-THE DREAM…website homeinnovations.com …e-mail me elaine@homeinnovations.com…WMAL.com is live audio…we’ve been talking about Y2K…everybody was expecting the worst…no big deal…is that all there is…what it did for me…one of the most important things in the last century…
Don: Just slipped in here…had a little Y2K with the coffee machine…we’re not into the 21st century until 2001, but we’re in the last year of the 20th century…
Elaine: We’re so dependent on electricity…if you were to pick one thing…
Don: We taught Sunday school years ago…12-13 years old…to give them an object lesson in values we told them, pretend you were selected to go on a spaceship and you’d be gone for the next ten years and you could only take with you what you could carry…what to you is so important that you’d have to have that with you… one little girl said her curling iron!
Elaine: Look at how the household has changed…
Don: Even our vehicles…computers run the vehicle…takes electricity to run the computer…there’s a guy largely forgotten in history, Nicola Tesla is a man who has a monument erected to him at Niagara Falls…came up with the first working model of alternating current…alternating current makes is possible to transmit large amounts of electricity over a long distance…you can’t do that with direct current…direct current, to give you an idea of how it works, you’re pushing electrons in one direction over a wire and the farther you push it the slower they move and the less pressure becomes…voltage drops…lose an enormous amount of power…alternating current switches its polarity so it pushes and pulls…pushes and pulls, pushes and pulls…so that same little electron is only going to move forward so far and them go backwards…a regular incandescent light is going to go bright and dim, bright and dim…happens so fast you don’t see it…like a movie…32 frames per second in a movie, but you never see the individual frames or the blink…
Elaine: How are homes going to change in the future…
Don: At Cabinet Discounters we just ordered a couple of new computers on Friday over the Internet…considerably more computer now for less money…not a slow change or evolution, it gets faster and faster every year…where is it going to end…what isn’t going to become computerized becomes the question…the computers are smaller, more powerful, more effective…software is getting better…moving too fast to comprehend…
Elaine: Did you see the Larry King interview with Bill Gates last night? Intriguing…how a few years ago that all of the computers were separately organized into their own operating systems…today we take it for granted that this term "PC"…interconnect all of the software into units…people looked at him like he was crazy…went ahead and chose the direction he had…computers will get smaller…
Don: They’ve got those palm-sized computers that interface with the computers…
Elaine: Music…download from the Internet the music you want…
Don: Have units that have memory chips in them so you can download the music…load twenty or thirty pieces into a memory chip and carry that with you…
Elaine: Unbelievable!
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Elaine: Great year at Cabinet Discounters…we’ve been told in advance that we’ve won some wonderful awards from Du Pont Corian…Magna dealer…making arrangements to go to the Kitchen and Bath show in April…great and exciting year…ended right…now your home is where we spend all this time…I was even watching the ball drop in Times Square…thrilled that I could be secure in my home…many of you are taking the time to resolve…do something with my home…kitchen… bathroom…I want to make sure you understand we’re going to be around to provide that service for you…if you would like to hear about how you can remodel your home…next week, Jim Polzin, manager of our Columbia store is going to join us…Ready, Set, Remodel…How, what to look for, what to expect…questions…chance for you to give us a call and ask any of your questions…lots of choices…if you come into any of the stores, we use that computer so much now for designing… giving you a chance to look at your kitchen, make the changes that are necessary…give you a chance to see how your kitchen will look with 42-inch high cabinets going up to the ceiling, we can do that…soffit…we can show you that…have your questions answered during the week, of course…1-800-THE DREAM…website…six stores throughout the area…bring information with you…tune in next Sunday…
Don: You mention computers…the glitzy part is the CAD, Computer Aided Design that allows you to visualize the kitchen, but the most important part of our use of the computers is the stuff people don’t really notice…the elaborate, detailed checklists…people don’t realize how complicated kitchens are…how many little parts there are…and just as with this Y2K scare, if any part is incorrect it can throw everything else out of sync…go back and correct…what we’ve discovered over the years is if we can eliminate those mistakes…more smoothly…humanly impossible…takes a computer to help us out…go through lists that we don’t forget anything…don’t let anything drop…computers don’t forget…they’re very good at remembering…doing math…checklists are humongous…
Elaine: Even what we just got through…we didn’t see all the work they were doing…so the systems didn’t fail…there’s a lot more coming through over the Internet…partnerships are important…integrate our systems…referral service…you know other people…let’s work together…remodeling, new home, addition…everybody will be able to know and tap into systems that’ll make it happen…what is your resolution?
Don: Been in the house since it was built…seems everything is wearing out at the same time…carpet…kitchen…floors and countertops or just start from scratch…roof…only a few more years…
Elaine: You know how they came up with that new reclaim material through Wilsonart…the floor that had the central…they’re going to put it on hold for awhile…make sure the glue works right…ProFX Flooring…glad you brought up flooring…kind of a glitch…
Don: Good that they were right on top of it…
Elaine: Take it off your list right now…
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Elaine: So excited…Builders Show in Dallas…was there last year…wonderful things, new and innovative…give you a report right from Dallas…and the following week, about some of the materials I might have found…keep listening…join us at cabinetdiscounters.com Happy New Year! Thanks for listening!