Citizens Prepare Small-Town Life for Impact of Millennium Bug

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At least 50 of these Y2K 'community preparedness' groups have sprung up across the United States, according to a fresh tally by the Cassandra Project, an all-volunteer group that O'Riley runs full time from her home in Louisville, Colo.

'It's a community concern because neither business nor government can resolve the problem in time for the year 2000,' she said. 'They're not getting the job done, and so we're going to have to take some personal responsibility.'

O'Riley predicts an 'explosion' of citizen interest in Y2K and pointed out that visits by computer users to the project's web site are running at more than 100,000 a week.

At the grassroots level, efforts vary depending on where the computer bug is most likely to strike in a given community (and figuring that out is a heavy task in itself). Looking into measures that resemble the contingency planning for a natural disaster, some Y2K activists are investigating backup sources of electricity and water distribution.

But even the more active groups -- O'Riley cites just a handful including the one here in Lowell -- are at a fledgling stage.

'Most people believe that if it's this big, somebody at the top must be doing something about it,' said Lowell resident Wells, whose day job is with Hewlett-Packard Co. 'They think somebody else is fixing it.'

Cynthia Beal, owner of the Red Barn Natural Grocery in Eugene, Ore., said she has just started getting together with neighbors at a bakery in nearby Veneta on Saturday afternoons to 'chew on goodies and discuss small-town Y2K.' She said, 'There's not a lot being done. There's a very smallnumber of people who are talking to a lot of other people. But it's still not in the being-fixed stage.'

This millennial anxiety has its genesis in the early computer age, when programmers preserved once-precious memory by using only two digits to signify the year in a date. So in millions of computers around the world, 1985 appears as 85, and 1999 as 99.

In the year 2000, those computer clocks will roll over to 00 and read the new year as 1900. That could confound computers and many services that rely on computers. Fixing the flaw involves scanning billions of lines of software code, a colossal undertaking in both the private and public sectors. (The quandary extends beyond software to any microchips embedded with two-digit codes.)

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