Citizens Prepare Small-Town Life for Impact of Millennium Bug

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Many experts believe it is too late to get the job done by the end of next year. Speaking at the National Press Club on July 15, Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah) said there is a simple way to solve the problem -- 'start in 1994.'

Bennett, who heads the new Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem, said he thinks water systems will hold up in 'most municipalities,' but not all. He said the nation's power grid will work but that there will be 'regional blackouts.'

He said he is worried about medical machines in hospitals and also raised the specter of riots in counties that fail to deliver welfare checks.

In the view of author and futurist Robert Theobald, the solution is to think locally -- in fact, very locally.

'We need to build community resiliency, so that if things go wrong, people will behave like they would in a climate catastrophe, like an ice storm or a tornado, where we gather around our neighbors and work with them,' said Theobald, 'rather than feeling that this has been imposed on us by some faceless, technological monster and that we should get angry about it.'

Theobald, who lives in Spokane, Wash., said he sees a danger of panic or a retreat into 'individual survivalist tactics.' At the same time, he said a healthy awareness of Y2K could also lead people back to the 'subneighborhood level, the four-block level, where everybody knows everybody, and we know who has propane, who has coal fires. And in the event of power outages, we will know what houses we could go to.'

The community approach is the one Wells and his neighbors are trying to take in Lowell, which has a population of nearly 100,000. For months, the Y2K volunteer has been speaking one-on-one with political and business leaders, to church and neighborhood groups, and recently to a wider audience through his five-minute local radio spot on Sunday mornings.

'Nobody knows exactly what's going to happen in the year 2000. But it's very clear that there will be disruptions, and some communities will do better than others,' Wells said in an interview. He said he learned something about the value of disaster planning when he and his son, now 15, went to help out during the Mississippi River floods in 1993.

Among other priorities, the Lowell Y2K Project has its eye on the system of canals and waterways that once powered the region's cotton mills at the dawn of America's Industrial Revolution. Those mill buildings have been preserved as museums and offices for high-tech firms, among other businesses. But the canals can still produce energy that some people looking at the problem would like to tap if the power goes out in 2000.

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