Posted on: Friday, August 15, 2003

Wall Street counts on backup power

By Alan J. Wax and Susan Harrigan
Newsday

On Wall Street, the lights blinked off late yesterday afternoon, but New York City's financial industry, for the most part, kept on going as emergency power and backup computer systems kicked in.

"Our systems are live and not damaged. We have backup systems," a spokeswoman for Merrill Lynch said.

The power outage hit just minutes after the 4 p.m. close of stock trading, and the big financial houses were embarking on the task of settling accounts.

Securities regulators expressed optimism that U.S. markets would open without incident today.

Ray Pellechia, a spokes-man for the New York Stock Exchange, said that the exchange and its office operations went to backup systems and that there had been no loss of data from yesterday's trading. He said the NYSE would open today on backup power, if necessary.

Pellechia said the Securities Industry Automation Corp. was operating at normal capacity on generator power. That organization runs the computer systems and communications networks that disseminate U.S. market data worldwide. Its computers keep going after markets close to process trade for the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.

Nasdaq also continued to operate on backup systems and had no trading interruption, a spokeswoman said.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York appeared to be weathering the loss of power "reasonably well," spokesman Peter Bakstansky said. "We're not seeing any major disruption at this point."

Bakstansky said the Fed Wire, the central nervous system of money transfer in the United States, "closed pretty much normally." The wire is the communications system that links all 12 Federal Reserve Banks in the country, their 24 branches, the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, and U.S. Treasury offices in Washington and Chicago.

"The big banks are using their backup systems to connect to us," he added.

The Merrill spokeswoman said the giant brokerage was able to stay in contact with exchanges overseas and expected to be "up and running" and fully functional.

Citigroup said it "invoked business continuity plans in order to minimize the impact of the power outages in the Northeast." The financial services giant has backup generators that enable its trading, clearing and settlement operations to continue without interruption.

Most financial services firms automatically store their account data and trading data on remote backup computer systems.