Multiply that event by a week, or maybe a month; or what about forever? That about covers the range of guesses as to how serious the impact of the Y2K (Year 2000) bug will be. The Y2K bug is the mother of all computer glitches and it's due to hit as our clocks register midnight between December 31, 1999 and January 1, 2000. At that time, all computers that programmers haven't made Y2K compliant, will allegedly break down because they can't distinguish between the year 1900 and the year 2000 when all they have to read is 00. Given the degree to which our societyÑour global society, that isÑdepends on a multitude of computers to function, that turn of the century breakdown will be something between a relatively mild inconvenience and a social cataclysm of monstrous proportions, depending on whom you talk to.
Consider this: The buyers for large food outlets such as Safeway, Albertson's and Raley's customarily use computers to determine "how much" of "what" they need to order and where they can get it, and they use the computer to do the ordering. Gasoline suppliers, ditto. Most of us get our water by means of computer-controlled devices. The electric grids most of us depend on are entirely computer-controlled. The hospitals and many other health services use computers for scheduling, diagnostics, preparation and distribution of medications, etc. Natural gas and propane supplies and deliveries depend on computer technology, as do most of our communications systems. A bulletin from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Year 2000 Program Office tells us that the Department is concerned about adverse impacts on agricultural markets and trade, including market news and data and commodities tracking. Programs providing food assistance, loans and crop insurance, and food safety and disease monitoring systems could all be affected.
Consequently, a worst-case scenario has us without food, water, fuel for transport or heating, transportation, adequate health care and all the many other things you can think of that come to us by means of some kind of computer-driven device. And nobody has any idea how long that might last.
Well wait a minute, we hear you say, computers are simply machines and machines are fixable, right? Right, but are they fixable in time? A lot of people, including many who should know better, have had their heads in the sand about this one, and we're now at the point where we have some 700,000,000 lines of affected program code with an average repair cost per line of one dollar and only 2,000,000 programmers in the United States to unglitch all those computers in just over a year. And that's only this country; half the nations in the world don't even have a plan. Another interesting item is that an agency or a firm can have their entire computer system Y2K compliant (fixed) only to have it succumb when it tries to interact with some other system which is uncompliant.
In 1997, Chrysler, which had been fixing its system since 1995, did a test. They shut down an entire assembly plant and set the clocks in the plant to 12/31/99. They expected glitches, but what they got was a security system shutdown that locked everybody in and out of the buildings. That resulted from embedded, date-sensitive chips in nearly every piece of equipment in the plant.
Some 100,000 older mainframe computers are still in use as the backbone workhorses of government and industry. They don't even write programs any more for some of the languages those machines use. The IRS, the Social Security Administration, the Pentagon, our nuclear arsenalÑwe can expect all these and more to quit functioning, at least according to the more pessimistic of those addressing the issue. Our lives are so computer orchestrated, in all areas from national security and air traffic control to catalog ordering, credit cards and computerized auto repair diagnostics and parts inventory, that the technological safety net we have become so dependent on is now even more fragile than our planet. And we approach an unchangeable deadline.
What to do? In fact, none of this may happen. Y2K may come and go with no more than a few days inconvenience, or it could bring down civilization as we know it. Or something in between. It makes sense to prepare for, if not the worst, at least some period of shutdown. That involves acting out of concern, but not in panic.
Think of it as a possible earthquake which takes out all our utilities and all our usual sources of supplies over an unknown period of time. To be ready we have to get together with our families or households, our neighbors, and our communities and set things up so that we have food, water and fuel on hand and a system whereby we can hunker down and ride it out by helping each other. Each household should have at least a couple of week's worth of supplies on hand and the community should have backup supplies in case that isn't enough. We might point out that such an arrangement is a good idea anyway. Short-term, emergency solutions of decentralized power pegged to sustainable power later, sustainable agriculture, local currency, and vigorous community barn-building of all sorts not only might save our behinds, they represent better long-term practices anyway.
Some folks will be tempted to collect their dry goods and get plenty of ammunition, then take themselves and their guns back into the woods, there to defend themselves against the imagined hordes that will be coming after their stores. Think again. The single individual against the world scenario plays well with survivalists and any number of TV-oriented romantics, but its efficacy is limited in real life. Whatever disruptions we may experience, we're far, far better off approaching them as neighborhoods or communities than as individuals.
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 1999
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited