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by Kevin Fagan
San Francisco Chronicle, January 5, 2002
If you're planning to ease those wintertime blues with a trip to Yosemite
or Hawaii's volcanoes, forget checking them out on the official national parks
Web site.
It's shut down. And it will remain so for the foreseeable future.
Access to the
official Web sites of the country's 384 national parks, monuments, battlefields
and other historical sites has been blocked since Dec. 5 by federal court
order -- causing headaches for trip planners and bureaucrats alike.
The National Park Service site -- www.nps.gov -- had been the most visited
outdoor-travel site in the country, with 700,000 hits a day. So since those
hits dropped to zero and the e-mail stopped, anyone trying to reach a national
parks office from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco and beyond has been forced
to use -- gasp -- a telephone, or go there in person.
Alternate sites run piecemeal by private or nonprofit organizations are helping
fill the gap. But they're not nearly as easy to find and use.
Meanwhile, the job of dishing out information and reservations is getting done, though a bit slower, park service officials say. Mostly what the shutdown is doing, they say, is reminding tourists and park overseers what things were like a seemingly distant decade ago, when computers had not yet interlaced themselves so tightly into everyday life.
The shutdown is an unfortunate byproduct of a 5-year-old federal lawsuit by Indian tribes over $10 billion in Native American trust fund money they say was mishandled by the U.S. Department of the Interior over the past century.
When a court-assigned hacker was able to penetrate the department's home page in November, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ordered the entire department's Internet system clamped off to maintain the security of the trust fund.
The fund administers
more than $500 million annually in royalties from timber, ranching and mining
operations on Indian lands. It is handled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs,
which is overseen by the Interior Department -- as are the Park Service, the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Survey and other units.
'No Idea How Long We'll Be At It'
All were affected by the shutdown, and can only be reconnected when the judge
says so. And though some pages -- including the Geological Survey and Interior
home pages -- were fortified and brought partially back up in mid- December,
nobody is estimating how long it will take to reinstate the whole system.
"We are working day and night, at breakneck speed, in an attempt to fill
the court order and get back online," Mark Pfeifly, Interior press secretary,
said yesterday. "We have no idea how long we'll be at it."
"In the
meantime, we're doing business the old-fashioned way, dusting off the fax
machine, actually talking to people on the phone, and even walking up and
down the stairways one floor to the next to deliver messages," he added
with a dry chuckle. "The fax machines are churning it out like it was
1989."
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