As Katie Williams shopped in the run-up to Christmas 1999, the holiday wasn’t on her list. The Kaufman resident had loaded up her cart with flashlights and batteries, toilet paper, water, and crates of food.
“I really think something’s going to happen,” Williams told The Dallas Morning News. “We have a pond in case we run out of water for the toilet. We can boil it if we have to drink it.”
Michelle Quintiliani and her family were planning to hit the road after Christmas, leaving behind their home near the Comanche Peak nuclear plant southwest of Fort Worth.
“We’re going to open our presents and then we’re gone,” Quintiliani told the Waco Tribune-Herald. “It’s probably stupid, but I don’t want to chance it.”
By December 30, shoppers in Victoria were hitting H-E-B hard.
“Today is busier than expected,” a store manager told the Victoria Advocate. “This is the kind of day we expected tomorrow.”
Twenty-five years ago this month, in the weeks before a new millennium, hardy Texans joined the rest of the world in making anxious last-minute preparations.
Computer experts had spent months warning that the Y2K bug might take down computer systems—and a society that was increasingly reliant on them—at the stroke of midnight. Breathless coverage took stock of the preparations as global industries—banks, utilities, airlines—assured folks that the lights would stay on if everybody did their part to gird against glitches caused by computer systems not built with the foresight to handle the “00” in “2000.”
For its part, the state of Texas spent a quarter-billion dollars on upgrades; the U.S. more than $100 billion; and across the world, $300 billion.
Texans weren’t overly concerned though. The results of a statewide poll in October 1999 found 55% weren’t worried about serious problems. One in 3 expected the lights to go out.
But they didn’t.
On New Year’s Eve, celebrations in Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston tallied more than 320,000 total revelers.
Headline writers were ready. In the Fort Worth Star-Telegram: “Y2K? Why Worry?”
San Angelo Standard-Times: “Y(awn)2K-Feared bug doesn’t bite.”
Wichita Falls’ Times Record News: “It wasn’t the night the lights went out in Texas after all.”
The bug may have been a bust, but Leon Kappelmann, a University of North Texas professor who worked on several technical committees in preparation for Y2K, says the world learned a lot.
“In terms of IT management, many of us learned what a mess we had just about everywhere and realized it was past time to professionalize and improve our practices,” he said. “IT had proliferated so quickly and completely over the 40 years prior to 1995, our ability to effectively and efficiently manage it had simply not kept up.”
And besides, some Texans hadn’t wasted any worries on Y2K.
C.M. Dehtam told the Tribune-Herald that he planned to be selling fruit out of his pickup on New Year’s Eve.
“If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen,” he said. “It’s not something I have any control over. I got other things to worry about, like what I’m going to eat tonight.”
