Government officials tried to calm people down. They did their best to explain that everything was going to be just fine.

“Planes won’t fall out of the sky,” Portland’s mayor, Vera Katz, assured her city in 1999.

But the tech experts were secretly a little worried. They didn’t think planes would drop from the clear blue, but they certainly could envision plenty of other problems happening when clocks ticked over to Jan. 1, 2000, potentially unleashing what had come to be known as the “Y2K bug.”

“There were two narratives going on,” recalls retired journalist Steve Woodward, who covered Y2K computer issues for The Oregonian in the run-up to the momentous New Year’s Day. “One of them was: Don’t worry, be happy -- this panic is ridiculous. But the other was that IT people were working around the clock. When you actually know stuff, you know what can fail.”

And what those information-technology folks knew wasn’t encouraging. They began testing the world’s computer systems in the late 1990s, and those tests triggered a plethora of failures -- little things like alerts at nuclear-power plants refusing to go off.

Gene McGhan, then maintenance manager at Vancouver, Washington's River Road Generating Plant, spent 1999 making sure the plant's computers were Y2K-compliant. (The Oregonian)THE OREGONIAN

The Y2K-bug problem was pretty straightforward, almost comical. When computerization was first working its way into governments and corporations, programs indicated the year with two digits, saving on storage space, which at the time was very expensive. This shorthand was mindlessly continued when systems were upgraded.

By the mid-1990s, programmers had noticed the issue, and they realized they had no idea what would happen to the nation’s banking, medical and other critical operations when January 1, 2000, arrived. These systems would revert to zero and …

Would they reset? Would they just stop? Would they go haywire?

To avoid finding out, governments and corporations belatedly began installing patches or whole new programs that would allow them to be “Y2K compliant,” the buzziest phrase of 1999.

“Nike spent more than $100 million repairing their computers,” Woodward says. “It cost a lot of money to tell computers that zero-zero meant the year 2000.”

Portland General Electric and PacificCorp, Oregon’s two biggest electricity utilities, dropped a combined $55 million.

Yet a lot of people refused to believe that everything would be fine if we just threw enough money at the problem. After all, they’d been subjected to an endless parade of warnings, such as the broadcaster who ominously intoned:

“The Central Intelligence Agency has begun to assess the readiness of the world’s computers for the year 2000, and the news is bad.”

By the latter months of 1999, Oregonians had received the message loud and clear.

Randy Onn, with his four kids in the background, loads 50-lb. bags of oats into the back of the family pickup in Dec. 1999. The Onns drove to Portland from their home in Chehalis, Wa. to shop for Y2K provisions. (The Oregonian)LC- THE OREGONIAN

ATM machines around the state saw usage spike. Stores had trouble keeping guns and other archetypal survivalist gear in stock.

On Dec. 31, people got serious about panicking.

“We’ve been just blitzed all day today,” said Peggy Shannon, the customer-service manager for the Fred Meyer store at Southeast 39th Avenue and Hawthorne Street. “People seem to be a little freaked out. They’re buying a lot of wood and batteries. We ran out of water yesterday.”

Gas stations were hit hard too, with long queues of cars, a sight unseen since the 1970s “Energy Crisis.”

“We’ve been slammed all day long,” a service attendant at a Portland Texaco station told a reporter. “A lot of people are not giving the complete truth. Some of them are saying, ‘I’m just going to the beach.’ But some are saying, ‘I’m filling up because I’m worried there won’t be any fuel left.’ One guy came in in a van today and filled up two gas tanks and eight gas cans, five gallons apiece.”

Designer contacts allowed people to see the New Year in style on January 1, 2000.

Government officials felt confident that pretty much all of the U.S.’s important computer systems had been upgraded, but out in the wider world the freak-out was on. As a result, many police forces blacked out leave and vacation time for the New Year’s weekend.

And when the big moment finally arrived?

Not much happened. Lights still turned on in homes across the land. Gas still flowed at Texaco stations. There was no rioting in the streets. There were a few computer glitches here and there, such as one that led to a delay in the distribution of food stamps in Oregon, but no more than that. (Bonneville Power Administration faced a minor emergency as 01/01/00 arrived, though it wasn’t caused by the “bug.” Vandals drove out to a BPA transmission tower near Bend and managed to knock it over.)

In Portland, the most notable actual Y2K-bug problem involved Alessandro’s restaurant. The downtown eatery’s cash register inexplicably bypassed its Y2K-compliant credit-card software and used the old version, which hadn’t been deleted after the upgrade’s installation. The result: a total of $38,466.69 in overcharges to 126 diners. Many of those customers had to call or go down to their banks to get the duplicate charges removed.

With such an anticlimactic apocalypse, people just wanted to forget all about their eleventh-hour gun-buying and gas hoarding and go back to their everyday lives.

But anything that gets this much attention doesn’t just go away.

Two months after Jan. 1, fears of a new Y2K bug suddenly arrived like a bad horror-movie sequel.

Warnings popped up that, because of a rare exception to the leap-year rule that happened to affect the year 2000, some computers wouldn’t recognize the date of Feb. 29 and would skip directly to March 1.

Nobody expected anything more than minor glitches this time around too, but the world’s newly trained army of Y2K sentinels stood prepared.

“What we learned during Y2K,” said PGE spokesman Patrick Stupek as the calendar barreled toward Feb. 29, 2000, “was that if we have any problems, we can mobilize very quickly.”

-- Douglas Perry

@douglasmperry

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