What if remote part of a view goes down?

In Oracle 8i, we have a table fairly frequently used in our code. Now I need to have a view which consists of a UNION of two similar tables, the original table hosted locally and a new one hosted remotely, and use it everywhere the local table was used before. If the remote goes down for whatever reason, and I do a SELECT on the view, I'll get an error, such as a timeout. Fair enough. But...

Is there a simple way that I can catch this error and just return data from the local table? By "simple" I mean handler code that I write only once, instead of every place a SELECT of the view occurs.

Atdhvaannkcse.

-- 
Mark Meyer                                         mmeyer_at_raytheon.com
Raytheon                     Voice (972)575-4595     Fax (972)575-5544