Water Industry Works to Overcome Millennium Bug

As the nation and world work to solve the Year 2000 computer date problem, the water and wastewater industry is an area of major concern. Entrepreneurs feeding on "Millennium Bug" paranoia are hawking water purification and storage systems to people worried that their water supply might fail next New Years day. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, industry associations and interest groups are working to ensure that Y2K computer problem will not shut down the nations drinking water and wastewater treatment systems.

As the nation and world work to solve the Year 2000 computer date problem, the water and wastewater industry is an area of major concern. Entrepreneurs feeding on "Millennium Bug" paranoia are hawking water purification and storage systems to people worried that their water supply might fail next New Years day. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, industry associations and interest groups are working to ensure that Y2K computer problem will not shut down the nations drinking water and wastewater treatment systems.

Y2K problems in drinking water and wastewater treatment systems can occur in computers, computer software, and in systems that use computerized controls. Much attention has already been focused on finding and fixing those problems because they are the most obvious.

For that reason, computers could end up with "negative" dates (which they dont recognize) or with wrong dates (if they interpret "00" as 1900 instead of 2000.) Some computers and equipment will crash; others may simply stop and need to be restarted; corrupt data and operations errors may also infect plant operation systems and administrative networks.