The end of days…
Jan 1, 2000, was supposed to be the end of the world. Anyone else remember that?
It’s hard to believe that in just a few short days, the Y2K ‘disaster’ will have been 20 years ago.
I remember all the hype and hysteria surrounding it. Clocks would go haywire, planes were going to fall from the sky or get lost due to GPS issues, and your bank would lose all your “money” because of date issues.
The run-up for Y2k started about 2-3 years ahead of time, when programmers started pointing out that the date codes in computer software wouldn’t handle the change from 99 (as in 1999) to 00 (as in 2000), as the programming would think it was 1900 instead of 2000.
…and it fizzled out
What ultimately happened? A whole lot of nothing apart from a lot of money being spent to fix the problem.
I know people who spent a lot of personal money to purchase property for a bug-out location. We considered it, but the place we looked that was both affordable and near like-minded people we trusted was a 19-hour drive from the Metropolitan Phoenix area. Impractical, to say the least. Ultimately, we decided on a ‘shelter-in-place’ strategy.
An ounce of prevention
We stocked our pantry with food we liked and would eat, had extra water on hand (about 3 weeks’ worth of drinking water) and water filtration, and 4 cases of MREs. We also filled both our vehicles and an extra 20 gallons of gas in case of short-term shortage. Living in the desert, there’s not much place to go that several million of my ‘neighbors’ wouldn’t have also gone to.
At the time, I was big into shooting competitions, so I’d purchase an extra case of ammo when I bought ammo for competitions. By the time Y2K came about, I had about 8k rounds of Israeli M193 and M855 ammo that I’d gotten. Sadly, I’ve used that up in the intervening decade. It was good ammo, and too bad it’s no longer imported (that I can find).
As I said, Y2K turned out to be a bust. However, it was invaluable to get me and my family thinking about preparedness and was what really started me into this area.
How about you…if you prepped for Y2K, what did you do? Were you even around for Y2K?