A new century dawned Saturday morning and across the county, residents still have running water, electricity and telephone service.

Saturday, January 01, 2000

A new century dawned Saturday morning and across the county, residents still have running water, electricity and telephone service.

Utility, emergency service and city officials in Ironton report that the Y2K bug was effectively squashed, as was the case in cities across the globe.

The new year did not dawn completely without incident, however.

In Ironton, a coincidental power outage at about 7 p.m. affected approximately 90 customers, but the cause of the outage was Y2K vandalism, not bugs, said Melissa McHenry, American Electric Power corporate communications director.

Power was restored within a half hour to the customers along Rock Hollow, Happy Hollow, County Road 128, Lakeview Lane, Magnolia Lane, Daniels Drive, McKee Drive, Private Drive 1724 and Private Drive 1784, Ms. McHenry said.

"There were three customers of those affected that it took a little longer to restore power for, but they had service before 9 p.m.," she said. "It did appear to the crew members that the incident was related to someone shooting near the lines, but there is no way to tell if it was intentional or just an accident."

Now that the new era has dawned, it’s business as usual for AEP, which reported no Y2K-related problems across the country.

"The rollover to 2000 has been virtually transparent to our customers," said AEP director of transmissions operations Mike Heyeck. "On any given day, we experience outages in different areas of our seven-state service territory due to bad weather and other factors, but because of heightened sensitivity created by Y2K, we had additional employees available to resolve any problems quickly and to provide timely information about those outages."

Four or five other incidents involving single customers also kept AEP crews out, but no outages were 2000-related, Ms. McHenry said.

"There were some scattered incidents in Ironton, and at the water plant, it was reported that the lights flickered a little bit, but that was related to one of the other single-customer outages," she said.

Otherwise, the city ushered in the new century quietly and efficiently, Ironton Mayor Bob Cleary said.

"I was happy to see that there weren’t any problems in the city – actually throughout the world – with Y2K," Cleary said. "It is always better to be safe than sorry, which is why we made all the arrangements that we needed to make in preparation for this."

A quiet New Year’s Eve and Day, however, were welcome, he added.

"I think it’s good that everybody prepared for Y2K. We had our computers upgraded and now we’re ready to carry on and keep business going as usual," he said. "I was definitely happy to see there weren’t any problems going on."

The city had employees standing by throughout Friday night and into the early hours of the morning Saturday in preparation for the rollover, but, other than a few lights that flickered at the water plant, the preparations weren’t necessary.

Ohio Highway Patrol also reported a quiet New Year’s Eve, with no fatal accidents in Lawrence County.

No significant Y2K glitches were reported across the state Saturday, reinforcing the notion that months of planning and millions of dollars in updating left computers comfortable with the changeover from ’99 to ’00.

Public confidence was a key to the solution that utility companies spent billions of dollars nationwide to find, said Donald Mason, a member of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio.

The utilities knew they could handle heavy holiday use during the change but were worried about systems overloaded with people trying to see if their lights and phones worked, Mason said.

”We had two problems. One would be those problems that, in fact, were computer-related. The second set of problems was … people overreacting to the perception of computer-related problems,” Mason said.

While Ohio’s utilities are still calculating their Y2K costs, the state has estimated it will spend $130 million fixing government computers.