Y2K BUG SWATTED IN SOUTHLAND.

Byline: Harrison Sheppard Staff Writer

What went right?

Computers were supposed to fail New Year's Day, plunging Southern California into darkness and chaos. Telephone systems were supposed to crash as millions of people made calls at 12:01 a.m. Banks were supposed to run out of cash as panicked citizens prepared for the worst.

Instead, throughout Southern California, as in the rest of the world, computers worked just fine when the clock struck midnight, making the transition as smoothly as if changing from any old day to another, instead of one millennium to the next.

No government agencies, public utilities, banks, hospitals or major corporations around Los Angeles reported any major problems New Year's Eve and Day, either from Y2K glitches or surges in use.

That was no surprise to officials in companies and agencies that spent hundreds of millions of dollars preparing for the Y2K switch.

``It's pretty much as we expected,'' said Maria Chacon, a spokeswoman for Pacific Bell. ``We were pretty confident this would be a nonevent for our customers. We had been working very hard since 1996 to ensure that we had uninterrupted telephone service.''

Most companies had extra staff on duty overnight, just in case, and government agencies set up special command centers that ended up being unnecessary.

The Y2K bug is a computer glitch created when programmers used two-digit shortcuts to represent years in computer software. So experts feared that older computers would crash or make errors as they read 00 for 1900, instead of 2000.

U.S. businesses and government agencies spent billions of dollars to buy new computer systems or fix programming code to prevent problems.

Those efforts were largely successful as only a few minor glitches were reported around the globe. Los Angeles was trouble-free, although some experts said a second test will come Monday, when most companies reopen for business.

``As a matter of fact, it was absolutely exemplary,'' said James Shebl, a spokesman for the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services, which had set up a Y2K Joint Information Center linking all government and quasi-public agencies. ``It was just like a model we had idealistically sought.''

Possibly the only glitch Shebl was aware of was with Airtouch Cellular in the Burbank area. A company spokesman said there were some very minor problems because the system was overloaded with callers, but the problems did not provoke any customer complaints.

Some phone companies even reported fewer callers than on a normal New Year's Eve, probably because the public complied with industry requests not to make calls at midnight to avoid overloading circuits.

Banks also survived unscathed. Leland Chan, associate general counsel of the California Bankers Association, said banks in the state normally have $150 billion and had an extra $50 billion on hand. But while there was some surge in activity, withdrawals were only slightly higher than in a normal holiday period, he said.

No problems were reported with automated teller machines. California banks spent close to $1 billion to guard against software problems, Chan said.

``It was tremendously good,'' Chan said, summing up the viewpoint held by almost every agency and business. ``It was a lot better than most people anticipated.''