Indonesia rolls into 2000 safely

Indonesia rolls into 2000 safely

JAKARTA (JP): There were no power outages, phones rang and
flights were kept to schedule as the new millennium arrived on
Saturday. People were also able to withdraw money from automatic
teller machines.

Early fears of massive chaos caused by computer crashes or
glitches proved totally groundless as public utility services
rolled smoothly into the year 2000.

Indonesia had been singled out by global computer experts
among countries most likely to face chaos because of the Y2K, a
bug which would supposedly cause computers to crash because of
their inability to read the year 2000.

As it turned out, Indonesia, like the rest of the world,
survived the Y2K scare, although public services companies took a
multitude of precautions, including around-the-clock vigilance.

"We are grateful that we have passed this critical moment,"
Minister of Communications Agum Gumelar, who heads the national
Y2K team, said one hour into the new millennium, as he observed
the operation at the main command post at the Indosat Building.

Agum has asked the Y2K team to stay alert for the next seven
days.

His team has been monitoring six areas critical to public
services: air traffic control at airports, road and rail signal
systems, banking, telephone system, power management and gasoline
supply. The team considers power management and air traffic
control the most critical.

"You cannot imagine if power outages happened, all systems
would have broken down and that would have been catastrophic,"
head of the Y2K alert post Djamhari Sirat said.

The alert post was tense, especially in the minutes leading to
the countdown. "Seeing other countries like New Zealand partying
only made us even more tense," Djamhari said.

During the countdown, the team members did not look at the
computer screens but instead watched the lights in the room. "If
they had gone off, we would've been in trouble," he said,
chuckling at their behavior.

PT Telkom, the state telecommunications company which has
spent US$29 million on making its systems Y2K compliant since
1997, said there were no breakdowns in its systems after
midnight.

"We received constant test reports from throughout Indonesia
every five minutes," Muhammad James, the company's Y2K secretary,
said on Saturday morning.

There was an increase in traffic shortly after midnight, but
that was not unusual, Muhammad said.

PT Indosat, the state company operating international
telecommunications services, said it used New Zealand as an
observation point, because it is six hours ahead of Jakarta.

"When our turn came, we made test calls to different countries
every hour," Indosat general manager Andi Setiabudi said.

Indosat made random calls to hotels in various countries from
New Zealand to the United States, giving New Year's greetings
while inquiring about the Y2K situation of the called country.

Although Indosat received no complaints on Saturday, its Y2K
post will keep working until Monday, he said.

State electricity company PT PLN also reported that it had
successfully withstood the millennium bug threat.

Minister of Mines and Energy Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono spent
New Year's Eve at PLN's Java-Bali transmission unit in South
Jakarta, which also houses its Y2K command post.

"We have to call the passing of the Y2K a national success,"
Bambang said minutes after midnight.

All airports in the country also operated without any glitches
during the rollover into the new millennium and throughout
Saturday.

Airport and airline officials said there was no irregularity
in any avionic equipment and system at airports, or on board
planes.

A spokesperson of state-owned airport management firm Angkasa
Pura I, Tom Syahril, said the airports did not even have to apply
the contingency plans they had prepared in case of trouble.

Several precautions, including spacing out flight intervals,
were executed to ensure safety between midnight until 7 a.m. on
Saturday.

In all, 262 planes flew in and out of Soekarno-Hatta
International Airport. Twelve flights were canceled, but it had
nothing to do with the Y2K bug. Some were canceled for technical
reasons.

Garuda Indonesia president Abdul Gani, monitoring the
situation, also talked to Garuda pilot Eddy Wibowo, who was
flying an Airbus A330 from Denpasar to Tokyo during the
countdown.

There was a false alarm when the Y2K command post received a
report at midday on Saturday from the Air Force suggesting that
something had gone wrong at Sam Ratulangi Airport in Manado,
North Sulawesi.

When the command post contacted Manado, it learned that
everything was operating smoothly, Tulus Rahardjo, an officer at
the National Y2K alert post, said.

Pujobroto, Garuda vice president for corporate communications,
said all the airline's eight international and 48 domestic
services left from Soekarno-Hatta on schedule on Saturday.

Bank Indonesia, the central bank, ran simulated banking
activities on Saturday and pronounced that they all ran well to
ensure smooth operations when banks reopen on Monday.

BI Deputy Governor Aulia Pohan said it would be business as
usual on Monday.

He said BI's critical systems, covering clearing, settlement
and accounting, were unaffected during the rollover.

A minor glitch developed when at midnight, the central bank's
computer date displayed "1 January 1900".

"At 12:05 a.m., the central bank sent a new status saying all
systems were normal and the date had turned to '1 January 2000,"
Tulus said.

While the National Y2K post remained on alert, some of the
staff wondered aloud whether everything had just been all hype.

"Some people think the Y2K problem was a trick by the computer
industry to rake in more profit," Djamhari said.

But he admitted that the threat existed because early versions
of computer systems could have mistakenly read the "00" as the
year 1900.

"We succeeded tonight because of the huge sums of money the
public spent to remedy the problem," he said.

Djamhari said the rollover was only the first of two critical
periods that computer systems must go though this year.

"Year 2000 is a leap year, and there is a chance that
computers will fail to read Feb. 29," he said. (cst/03/04)