- LONDON (Reuters) - A burst of solar flare activity around the millennium
could wreak more havoc on satellite systems and power grids than the Year
2000 computer problem, a senior British Y2K planner said Thursday.
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- A surge of solar flares or solar storms
that can shut down power grids and burn out satellites was expected to
peak in late 1999 and early 2000, a conference for Y2K planners was told.
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- ``Solar flares could do damage far beyond
anything the Year 2000 could do, and it could hit us on that weekend,''
said Michael Lewis, the deputy chief executive of Britain's Association
of Payments and Clearing Systems (APACs).
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- The last peak in the 11-year cycle of
solar flares was in March 1989, when surge of atmospheric magnetic activity
shut down the Hydro-Quebec power grid in Canada, leaving 6 million people
without power for days.
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- Lewis, who is helping coordinate the
British banking system's Y2K response, said the dangers of solar flare
activity happening in tandem with the Y2K computer problem could not be
ignored.
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- ``It's not a 'my wife has been abducted
by aliens story.' It's a serious problem. It comes in cycles and it happens
to coincide with the millennium this time,'' Lewis later told Reuters.
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- ``It's something that people tend to
forget. It can knock out communications satellites.''
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- A sneak preview of how solar flare activity
could paralyze communications came in May last year when it is believed
solar flare activity knocked out the Galaxy 4 satellite over the United
States.
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- For three days' chaos ensued as 40 million
pagers stopped working, television and data broadcasts were disrupted,
and many credit card transactions were blocked.
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- The satellite's operator, PanAmSat, had
to ask users to redirect their antennas to other satellites. The outage
caused havoc in the U.S. medical system because many doctors relied on
their pagers to be alerted about patients.
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- This next solar flare peak is expected
to have a much heavier impact on communications satellites than in 1989.
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- This is because so many more satellites
have been put in place and are used more widely for mobile phones, the
global positioning system (GPS), and as a route for the Internet.
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- Lewis said communications and power failures
caused by solar flares could compound a loss of public confidence in communications
and computer systems just when it was most needed -- around the millennium.
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