I realized something today as I was trolling around through my library of various survival books. Do you guys know what this December is? Think about it a moment….what happened 20 years ago this December? Correct! It will be the 20th anniversary of The Great Y2K Scare!
An interesting book at the time, it’s downright amusing to read now. Technology, especially on alternative energy systems, has changed so much in price and performance that the recommendations in this book are like reading Tappan’s “Survival Guns” and being amused at the anachronistic recommendations. HOWEVER, what worked twenty years ago would work now, just not as efficiently or economically…so there is still some merit here.
Ah, remember that? We were going to have to face the apocalypse with 10-rd magazines and nothing to fix our bayonets to because the Assault Weapons Ban was still in effect. I remember seeing news articles about True Believers selling the condo in California’s wine country and buying scrub land in Arizona to build a bunker, fence it in, and ride out the massive civil disturbance that would happen as we all suddenly found ourselves in a Stirling/Kunstler/Forstchen novel. Everyone laughed and pointed fingers at people who were concerned over it while secretly doing a little extra shopping and stockpiling.
With hindsight being 20/20 and all, we know now that Y2K turned out to be prety much a bust. The following summer there were some fascinating garage sales as people sheepishly sold off their new-in-box generators and whatnot. But, just as people started laughing at the foolishness of the preparedness crowd we had the Septenber 11th terrorist attacks and suddenly having a few goodies tucked away didnt seem so unreasonable.
Its a toss up as to which thing made preparedness more mainstream…Y2k or 9/11. Either one, on its face, wouldn’t have been enough but the two events (or non-event, I suppose) together within a short timeframe….thats a different story. But, that was almost twenty years ago and many people who jumped on the bandwagon after those events have probably slacked off a good bit. However, those of us who were of that mind before those events took it as validation of our beliefs and continued apace with the conviction of the vindicated.
9/11 also sent a whole generation of people into the military and overseas where a good chunk of them, now in their 30’s and 40’s, got exposed to what the rest of the workd is like when you’re away from the relative civility of the First World and it’s people. I’ve met plenty of Afghanistan/Iraq vets who were not into preparedness, but I’ve never met one who thought it was stupid. They have a perspective that people who have never been to Third World violence-fests simply don’t have.
I do recall sitting around at midnight on New Years Eve 1999 with an AR across my lap waiting to see what happened. As it turned out….virtually nothing. Certainly nothing catastrophic to my world. Oh, maybe there were some isolated incidents here and there of time locks not functioning, extremely localized grid failures, that sort of thing….but a Purge-like, blood-in-the-streets, we’re-on-our-own sort of situation? Nope.
It was about ten years before I finally used up all the rice I had laid back, and I’m fairly confident theres still a few ammo cans of .38 and .308 ammo sitting in storage from that era. A lot of the consumables (toilet paper, batteries, canned goods, etc.) were used and replaced as time went on, so no real waste there. I would guess that the only real ‘wasted effort’ was that instead of finding a New Years Eve party to attend for the big event I chose to hole up in my house with a very attentive eye and ear on the news.
But, of course, the world is a somewhat different place now. Terrorism was something that happened overseas, digital infrastructure attacks were a theory, people with too many vowels in their name limited themselves to blowing up cars in distant lands, and no one got strip searched for trying to bring more than 3 oz. of shampoo on an airplane. I would guess that the reasons to be prepared are even more pressing than they were then. :::shrug::: Makes no difference to me. Even if the world suddenly turned into a quiet, peaceful place tomorrow I’d still keep a secret room in the house….just in case.
Y2K was anything but a “bust”. It was actually a very close thing. In 1997 I was working for a department of my state that paid Medicaid providers. The first week of July over 70,000 of our Medicaid providers – doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, etc. were suddenly archived by our ancient mainframe computer system. No one knew why, but they weren’t going to get paid until someone figured out what happened and fixed it.
Eventually it was discovered that there was a “feature” in the software that, in order to save space on the computer system, automatically archived providers after 30 months of inactivity. The way it worked was that 30 months were added to the date of last activity, and that date was compared to the current date. When the system added 30 months to 7/01/97, it came out to 01/01/00, which meant no billing activity had occurred for many, many years.
It took weeks to fix, and the state started throwing money at contractors to fix the systems. When January 1, 2000 (Saturday) rolled around, I was in my office overnight, “just in case” all the work we’d done over the previous 2 1/2 years hadn’t been adequate. We had some minor glitches, but we’d managed, with a lot of overtime, to fix everything major.
I didnt mean that there weren’t potential problems, but rather that either those potential problems were addressed or they never manifested at proportions people were concerned about. Your anecdote underscores that – things either got fixed, mitigated, or inspected….end result is planes didn’t fall from the sky and it was, for the most part, a non-event.
My sole purchase as a y2k prep was some cheap Russian gen1 night vision. I didn’t believe in it because:
1) I was into being prepared anyway
2) massive amounts of resources were being thrown at the problem already
3) it was so obviously way overhyped in all social circles
That said, I watched the news closely as Australia and the rest of the early countries clicked over past midnight. Went to bed knowing it was going to be nothing that would materially affect me that night. I still have the gen1 junk.
I was prepared before Y2K, and still am.
No change for me, well maybe more prepared–
We found our 1998 preparedness inventory list. I was a single-sided 5×8″ sheet of paper. Now, it’s a bit longer. I sleep better and worry less. At least about us.
Before Y2K, I was more a classic Nuke War prepper. I thought a years worth of food and guns were all I needed. A bit of ( in hindsight ) optimism we could recover. But thanks mostly to Gary North and his public service, I spent years learning far more in depth about how systems were interdependent and complex. It opened my eyes to civilization collapse, Peak Oil and etcetera. Without the scare, I’d still be mentally unprepared ( or at least far behind in comprehension ). I’m glad it happened. Better out money than comprehension or practice.
You did learn that ‘peak oil’ is just so much bs by those trying to scare you or sell you something, right?
In the last 20 or so years we have pretty much doubled the proved and probable reserves in the world via new discoveries and tech. And that doesn’t even take into account the fact that you can turn coal into oil when the prices is right. Don’t believe me? Ask the Germanx- they did it in WW2. Capitalism Rules.
Retired from the Petroleum industry and never heard of EROI? You lose energy converting coal into liquid fuel. South Africa tried it also, being embargoed. Strange how they didn’t stick with it. I smell a fracking fanboy. You keep beating that hobby horse. Peak Oil isn’t about running out of oil, it is first about the economic repercussions of lack of growth in oil production. See “The Crash Course” about the need for growth to keep the economy functioning.
We still have some equipment at work that has round stickers on it that say Y2K and have a check mark on it.
Are those stickers green? We had green Y2K OK stickers. I worked in a hospital and we started prepping for Y2K almost a year out. Policy was any 2 in the department could be out on vacation at any given time. First two people to put in for a date got it. I put in for Dec 31st and Jan 1st in June. My boss hit the roof and refused, even though I was the first and only one. I put in my two weeks notice three weeks before and never looked back.
A few years ago I bid and won an ebay auction for about 50 new or like new US military Extreme Cold Weather sleeping bags. I had to drive three hours each way to pick them up.
They were at a State Highway Department admin and work facility that had quite a bit of underground storage space.
In preparation for Y2K they had squirrelled away military cots, sleeping bags, air mattresses and other gear. When the disaster failed to materialize the stuff was just left in storage.
Years later they cleaned out storage and auctioned it off. I wound up with the 50 or so sleeping bags at a cost of less than $2 each. Wish I had grabbed the cots.
Watch out for canvas surplus cots!
I bought what seemed to be the best quality cot I ever owned from a yard sale for $5.00, and I was quite pleased with my find. Thick hardwood legs, very sturdy canvas, etc.
I didn’t make it through the first night without feeling and hearing that tell-tale rip.
I remember that time well. About two weeks before it was supposed to hit we were having a discussion about what we were to do at work should Y2K happen. After the details of what the plan was and assignments given out, the chat turned to what people had been doing to prepare for the event.
While the chat was going on, I simply sat back and said nothing. I’d made my preps and had stockpiled stuff just in case but I didn’t want to share what I had done with the world.
Our manager noticed I was being quiet and asked me directly what I had done, so I answered nothing. He looked at me and asked why I had so much faith in the system. I replied that I didn’t have any faith but as a gun owner there was nothing my neighbors had that I couldn’t take away if I needed it bad enough.* You could have heard a pin drop after that.
* My views on looting are such, that I would never even consider it even under the worst conditions.
Fast forward 20 yrs and now your behind has been red flagged.
You’re absolutely right, which is why I don’t talk about any of this stuff outside of forums like this. And even then, tracing the comments back to me would be a task.
Damn, time really flys doesn’t it. I remember the Y2K scare, it really took a lot of preppers in (including myself). I was watching Australia ring in the new year when it dawned on me likely very little if anything was going to happen.
I know a lot of vendors made a shitload of money on preps sold. Some folks reportedly went heavy on credit cards, thinking they wouldn’t have to pay it off.
I was very involved in the survivalist scene in the 1980s, believing that global thermal nuclear war was a possibility at any given time. Then the Soviet Union fell apart. My interest in preparedness issue waned to the point that it was almost nonexistent. In the early 90s, I would say, “What are the chances that in the foreseeable future we will ever have a reason to engage in a nuclear war with Russia or China?” (I haven’t said that for quite some time now.)
Then Y2K came along. It awakened some of my old concerns, and I decided to make extra preparations. I purchased extra food, but the amounts were laughable when I look back at it. The canned goods, almost entirely from a local dollar store chain, 99 Cents Only, sat in my garage for years. Last year, I finally threw them away.
If a clear case concerning the erosion of the US Dollar was ever needed, the brands available and the quality of the products that could be purchased for a dollar in 1999 were clearly apparent. In no way could those same products be found for $1.00 today. The same dollar store chain still exists today, but the quality of much of the food sold in it is much reduced. (Although bargains can still be found on many food items, I will not touch any food item that is made in China or a Third World Country). Yet, the store’s name should be 99 Cents Mostly now.
Around 2008, History Channel had its “Armageddon Week.” As part of it, it included a program entitled, “After Armageddon,” a docudrama about a massive flu pandemic that originated in China and then hit the US. (It can still be seen on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtP80Z08lfg) I didn’t disagree with one word I heard from the “talking heads” who, from time to time, interrupted the characters’ journey in order to offer opinions about what the characters were doing wrong and what they were doing right. The program awakened my survivalist concerns. Given that my concerns in the 1980s were solely related to nuclear war, I had never seriously considered flu pandemics (or for that matter, cyber attacks on the power grid, financial collapse, etc.)
As a result of what I saw in that program, I have a much different attitude now concerning preparedness, and I am much better prepared to face a world turned feral.
12/31/1999. I bowled, I drank a lot of high quality tequila, I had my last cigarette. It was a good night.
Oh man I am a little late the story of my life but I still have the book..And a few other from B.T.P. Flash back I have been waiting for one.
Y2K was real.
Our IT department took it seriously, because we were running SCO UNIX.
The UNIX itself was patchable without too much difficulty, but several servers failed testing to move past 12/31/99
We would have had failures & been out of business for a while -had we not prepared.
We had to buy some new hardware & re-install which we had completed by September of 99.
One reason Y2K was a nothing burger for most peeps is because IT depts DID take it seriously & identify what units were vulnerable.
A lot like we don’t think about the power company and all the people working 24/7 to keep it on. We only notice if something breaks.
The threat may have been real, but it’s the actualization of it that wasnt.