by Mark Joseph
Despite millions of hours and billions of dollars spent in preparation for Y2K, the USA had proved as vulnerable to the millennium bug as the rest of the world. All airports were closed. Rail traffic slowed to a crawl. Food supplies were disrupted. People panicked, drove into the woods, ran out of gas and froze. In some cities New Year’s Eve parties and millennium celebrations dissolved into local chaos. Riots erupted in Washington and Tampa, but not in Boston or Philadelphia. Even in the District of Columbia, which suffered the most, the pointless violence petered out after a few hours. Everywhere, the deranged used the cover of darkness to steal and pillage and commit crimes of personal vengeance, but the vast majority of Americans were neither criminals nor anarchists. They neither panicked nor huddled terrified in their homes. They responded as they did to storm, earthquake, flood or attack by hostile aliens. In standard American fashion, they’d ignored the coming disaster until it was too late, but once it happened, they galvanized into action and fought back.
If the morning of December 31, 1999 had resembled Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, when the stock market crashed and precipitated the Great Depression, then the first hours of January 1, 2000 resembled December 7, 1941, the day Pearl Harbor was attacked. In 1941 the USA had not been prepared to go to war, but when war came to them, the American people put aside their squabbles and differences and brought their enormous energy to bear on one concerted effort. Millions had volunteered immediately and risked their lives for the communal good.
In January 2000, America was divided over dozens of political, social and religious issues, and partisans argued across wide chasms with deep historical roots. It was difficult to sustain a republic founded on the belief that all had equal rights when in practice the opposite was true. People disagreed, sometimes violently, on race, abortion, drugs, sex, religion, campaign contributions and industrial deregulation. The political process and the Constitution itself were under attack from the left, the right and even the center. Millions hadn’t believed a word uttered by the government since Vietnam and Watergate destroyed all credibility. America was far from perfect, and would never be perfect, fair or just; nevertheless, striving toward the ideal, even if it was ultimately unobtainable, was preferable to surrendering to tyranny or chaos. When the lights went out, priorities were suddenly thrown into proper perspective. Ideological and religious dogma didn’t solve immediate problems. Agendas were worthless. It was neighbors helping neighbors that did the trick.
The Y2K work already completed gave the nation a head start and a great advantage over the rest of the world, but if the American people wanted a resolution to the crisis, the only option was to knuckle down and do the work. They didn’t hesitate.
Blasted by the millennium bug, this was a chance to rise like a phoenix from the ashes and strike back. When the phones went down, a half-million phone workers showed up, ready to go. In mines and factories, railroad yards, fuel depots and laboratories, people arrived in the middle of the night to get things working again. They didn’t have much success at first, but they didn’t give up. Every power plant swarmed with engineers searching out problems, jerry-rigging repairs, plotting workarounds and solutions. The problems were immense, the damage seemingly unfathomable, but piece by piece, chip by chip, the process of recovery was started.
* * *
New York had endured major blackouts in 1965 and 1977. After the 1965 episode, people told fond stories of how many babies were born nine months later. People had been afraid but not terrified, and the city had survived with good humor and high spirits. By 1977 the city had changed dramatically. In twelve short years New York had become grim and dangerous, reeking of poverty and crime, boiling with anger and frustration, and the blackout spawned stories of violence and urban chaos. Urban legend held that looting had started within ten minutes. The 1977 incident had occurred on a hot summer day when the city was already close to exploding with racial tension. Most of the looting was nothing more than a massive crime of opportunity. Squalor, poverty and racial oppression add up to a lot of angry, hotheaded young men, and it was they who looted in a spasm of rage.
Now, in 2000, massive immigration had changed the demographics once again. In the last quarter of the 20th Century so many new faces had arrived that no ethnic group had a majority. Everyone belonged to a minority. Except for the homeless and most desperate immigrants, New York’s poor didn’t look poor. Fed at McDonald’s and dressed by K-Mart, they had TVs and cars and minimum wage jobs that kept their heads one inch above water. The urban poor were the legacy of an economy that had evolved from labor-intensive manufacturing to a service economy and automated high technology, leaving huge segments of the population without the skills needed to thrive in a techno-world. The prosperity from high technology and the global economy was concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, creating the most inequitable distribution of wealth since the Second World War. Economic conditions and three centuries of vicious racism had set the stage for riots and looting of epic proportions, and America expected the ghettos to explode if the lights went out.
Unlike previous power failures, the great American blackout of January 1, 2000 didn’t come as a surprise. Millions celebrating in the street were caught unprepared, and hundreds of thousands already had panicked and left the city, but many more millions had considered the possibility of a blackout and taken elementary precautions against chaos and anarchy. The long campaign by community leaders to prepare the most squalid ghettos had convinced the populace that burning down the place where they lived was not effective urban renewal. Smashing windows and looting TVs didn’t exact revenge against real oppressors. In 2000, hoodlums had cellphones and computers and knew Y2K was coming, and they understood that looting would bring heat they didn’t need. The word had spread through the ghettos and barrios: don’t take that TV. If the power goes out, it won’t work anyway.
Perhaps the most prepared organization in New York was the Mafia, who’d seized on Y2K like a mongoose on a python. The advantages of surviving a crisis was never lost on them. Every business remotely connected to the well-being of the Cosa Nostra had an expensive, well-managed Y2K compliance program, and on New Year’s Eve enjoyed the protection of armed security guards.
Despite the preparations and warnings not everyone got the message. After a day of watching blackouts around the globe, opportunistic looters in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx had picked their targets, electronics being the most popular followed by jewelry and apparel. When the lights went out, dedicated criminals were joined by mobs of drunken New Year’s Eve revelers who smashed into the first electronics stores within fifteen seconds. The crazed, disorganized looters were caught in the act by the police, deterred by armed merchants and confronted by angry and determined community patrols. Inevitably, fear and itchy trigger fingers resulted in dozens of looters being blown away, the violent percussions lost in the din of firecrackers and the traditional New Year’s Eve blasting away with firearms. Looting in the boroughs was brutally snuffed out within an hour.
* * *
Armies of frightened people had been fleeing New York all day. By one in the morning almost three hundred thousand were scattered in all directions and lost in the dark. When they learned that the lights had remained on in Manhattan, the exodus reversed and people streamed back toward the light, as they had in Tokyo. The already overcrowded island was inundated again from all directions. The subways were jammed. People walked across the bridges and arrived from New Jersey and Staten Island in fleets of boats. At that moment, the citizens of Manhattan confounded every stereotype of New York as a cold and heartless city.
New York threw open its doors. Starting in midtown, hotels graciously opened their lobbies and banquet rooms to shelter the stranded. When Macy’s unlocked the doors and let five thousand freezing visitors in out of the cold, Saks and Bloomingdale’s followed. Countless churches and office buildings, National Guard armories, subway stations, theaters and schools were turned into impromptu shelters.
* * *
At 1:00 the global blackout reached the Central time zone. In Chicago, Dallas, and Mexico City, the muscle and sinew of North America succumbed to the millennium bug with, by now, predictable results. Fortunately, the disassembly of the western grids meant Biloxi, Wichita Falls, Green Bay, Duluth and the entire state of Nebraska had power. Along the entire length of the Mississippi River, only steamboats had lights. In New Orleans, the antique craft chugged along the riverfront without a care, rip-roaring New Year’s Eve parties in full swing.
At 2:00 A.M., midnight Mountain standard time, Jesus did not appear in Hermosillo, Mexico. Electric power, however, disappeared. Several hundred miles north, the lights blinked out in Denver but stayed on in Colorado Springs. Space Command was well lit all night as information technicians tried to restore control to the GPS satellites. Around 7:00 in the morning, Zulu time, the GPS backup system that broadcast the time signal through a series of ground level transmitters was restored. The few phone companies with compliant equipment were able to reconnect and begin the slow rebuilding of their vast networks.
* * *
By 2:30 A.M. Sarah had disaster recovery teams in each of the three failed power plants. Line engineers had inspected every substation, tested hardware and made repairs, and by 3:00, power was restored to Brooklyn and Queens. The influx of refugees to Manhattan slackened, and the newly lit areas began to absorb the flow from Long Island.
On Nassau Street the Midnight Club was exhausted and running on sheer exhilaration. Judd tinkered with the radios, tuning into shortwave and ham broadcasts and recording everything. On military frequencies, National Guard units were generating a great deal of radio traffic as the militia tried to prepare for any contingency. Civil disorder had clocked in at much lower levels than expected, but anything could happen over the next few days.
Across the room Bo was running diagnostics on Big Allis, Number Three at Ravenswood, trying to bring the system’s most powerful generator back on-line. Ronnie had the Department of Environmental Protection on the phone and was explaining where to look for faulty chips in the sewage treatment plants. Jody had put aside her camera and was sitting with Doc on the couch, drinking champagne, holding hands and watching the last few minutes of Breathless on videotape. When the movie ended, Doc flipped through the channels and discovered ABC had resumed local broadcasting from the studio on West 65th Street.
“Be careful if you’re driving in Queens,” the anchorman was saying. “Traffic lights are performing erratically.”
“Too bad they don’t have a satellite link,” Judd said. “They could tell us about all the National Guardsmen who reported to Fort Dix that nobody knows what to do with.”
“I can give them a satellite,” Carolyn said. “I happen to have one right here.”
“Hmmm,” Doc said. “Jody, get your camera.”
“I am the Phone Goddess,” Carolyn said. “Watch this.”
She called ABC, got the newsroom producer on the line, impressed him with the fact that his phones were working, explained that she was with the company that had saved Con Edison and Chase Manhattan and asked, “How’d you like to be connected to functioning satellites? I can give you links to your trucks in the city and a link to Europe as a bonus.”
The ABC producer almost choked on his bagel. “Oh, God, yes yes yes. How much?”
“Ten million for the rights and two hundred grand a day for ten days minimum.”
“Oh, Jesus. That’s a lot of money. I’ll have to get that cleared.”
“I have phones. I have a satellite. You have zilch. Welcome to the new order.”
“Okay. It’s a deal.”
“Who’s your bank?”
“Chase.”
“How convenient,” Carolyn said. “I’ll give you a nice phone line and a useful number at Chase. If you actually have ten million dollars, you can have it transferred to the account number I’m going to give you. When I hear from them, I’ll get right back to you.”
Next, Carolyn called AT&T and asked the system manager if she were willing to lease transponders to ABC for a nice premium, say five million in advance and a hundred thousand a day for a minimum of ten days. Negotiations. Callbacks. Finally ABC said yes, the bank called and said the money was transferred and Carolyn winked at Doc who winked back.
“You planned this,” Jody stated.
“I worked out a few scenarios in advance, just in case. ABC is across the street from the ConEd command center. I had to have clean phone lines into ConEd, and since Carolyn was right there, she did a little work on ABC’s phones. Better than Bell Atlantic. Better than their own people.”
“What other little surprises do you have?”
“If I told you, they wouldn’t be surprises, would they?”
A few minutes later ABC had a live link to a truck at Bellevue Hospital where the crew had tracked the mayor with police scanners.
* * *
Bill Packard stood inside the emergency room doors watching the ABC video truck. At first the crew was hanging around gazing longingly at the sky, and then something got them excited. They huddled inside the truck, started the generator and rotated the dish. Then they fired up lights, camera, sound and a reporter who stood in front of the emergency entrance and delivered a piece on the mayor.
Rudy was asleep in a private room, diligently attended by a bevy of doctors and nurses and guarded by guys with headsets. Having negotiated the traffic, ABC was on the job, and Packard had no desire to be part of their show. He walked through the hospital to the entrance on First Avenue, hit the streets and caught the subway.
When he changed trains at Penn Station, the pedestrian tunnels were packed with people camping out. Somewhere in the maze of tunnels an enchanting flamenco guitar turned the air to froth. New Year’s Eve litter collected in corners: gold glitter, silver stars, crumpled funny hats. The parties continued in tight clusters of stranded suburbanites staking out concrete and tile turf. At three in the morning the food kiosks enjoyed a brisk trade, but the newsstands had no papers. Packard asked a vendor what was up.
“I dunno. I got no papers. That’s all I know.”
“Right.”
Packard started to walk away when a blind guitarist called out, “Hey, mister.”
“Yeah?”
“The presses at all the papers went down behind Y2K, and I heard the trucks are stuck in the garages because their dispatch computers are spewing out gibberish.”
He played a flourish of Spanish chords and smiled.
“You’re a fountain of information,” Packard said, giving him five dollars. “Play on.”
As Bill Packard was riding the train up the West Side, the millennium bug reached the West Coast. Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Las Vegas, San Diego, San Jose and Los Angeles bit the millennium dust. Miraculously, Oakland remained alight. In California, years of earthquake education helped families and individuals to prepare, but communities, cities and governments were devastated by computer malfunctions. Silicon Valley imploded. The heart and soul of American technology was left to reap what it had sown.
* * *
Thirty minutes after leaving the hospital, Packard stepped into the 24th Precinct on West 100th Street, a loony bin sideshow movie set police station full of millennium crazies and exasperated cops.
Ed Garcia was asleep at his desk, head cradled in the crook of his elbow.
“Ed!”
“Wha…? Oh, Christ, Bill.”
“Sentries found asleep at their posts w
ill be shot.”
The captain chuckled. “So shoot me. You do the mayor?”
“Yeah.”
“He gonna live?”
“Yeah.”
“You gonna vote for him?”
“You know, I asked the nurses that,” Packard said, turning his thumb down. “How many people are still in the park?”
“I don’t know. A few thousand. The drunks will freeze. They moved a lot of them into the armory over on the East Side, but some just refuse to leave.”
“You gonna stay here all night?”
Garcia nodded his head, yawned and rubbed his eyes. “I got Jesus downstairs with a broken arm. You wanna look at him?”
“You bastard.”
“Yeah? Why’d you come over here? To drink champagne? I got your champagne. I got three cases of Mumms looted from Spillman’s store this afternoon. How d’ya like that? I’m takin’ it home. Fuckin’ all right. Hahahahaha.”
“How’d Jesus break his arm?”
“Nailing himself to a cross. He missed. Hey, man, I got Jesus three times over, I got Mary, I think I got Pontius Pilate. I don’t know what I got. Mohammed, I got him. I definitely got Buddha. I may have a bunch of Krishnas, but I think we let them go. I got the Irish Republican Army, the Jewish Defense League and Free Puerto Rico. It’s real ecumenical around here right now. Mostly, though, I got drunks. We’d toss them out, but they’d freeze.”
“Sounds like just another Friday night in the Big Apple. Happy New Year.”
“You gonna check out my broken Jesus?”
“Okay. You got any tetanus vaccine around here?”
* * *
Jonathon Spillman finally walked across 85th Street to see if Shirley was all right. Unlocking his apartment, he heard voices, peeked into the living room and saw two Jehovah’s Witnesses asleep in chairs and three huddled in prayer.
Shirley was in the kitchen making coffee. At first Spillman wasn’t sure he recognized her. He’d left an hysterical, sobbing woman who’d locked herself in the bedroom, and now his kitchen was occupied by a blissed-out millennium hostess.