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)