Apocalypse Now? Depending on whom you ask, 1999 will end either with a bang or with a whimper. by Jim Hanas Two floors beneath city hall, the corridors are made of cinderblock and the doors are gray double-steel. Next to one such door — fitted like the rest with a square pane of shatterproof glass — there is an intercom. “Who is it?” a voice says. If your answer sounds plausible, you’re buzzed into a waiting room. Not everyone is buzzed in. On the inside of the door, next to a decorative flyer announcing the office Christmas party and an e-mail asking volunteers to help fill holiday baskets for the Division of Public Services, there is a description of a woman (middle-aged, female, white), who will not be buzzed in. “Do not allow her to enter!” it says. “She’s mentally unbalanced and could pose a threat to the employees of this office.” This is a bunker with all the trappings of intrigue. The office behind the steel door is the Memphis/Shelby County Emergency Management Agency (EMA), whose job it is to plan for the unplannable — ice storms, tornados, the deployment of weapons of mass destruction. Its subterranean location is strategic, although — as EMA director Clint Buchanan observes — it’s better for a tornado than it is for a flood. Buchanan, a city employee for almost three decades and a former chief of the city’s Emergency Medical Services Bureau, took over the reigns at EMA late last year. EMA is the successor organization to Civil Defense, the agency whose job it was to prepare citizens for inevitable nuclear attack. It became EMA in the early 1980s and, as the Cold War dwindled, its mission was broadened to include all manner of unthinkable catastrophes. To explain EMA’s function to the lay public, Buchanan resorts to movie references. The disaster flick Volcano stars Tommy Lee Jones as the director of a local EMA and Buchanan owns a copy. For the kids, he appeals to Men in Black (also starring Tommy Lee Jones, coincidentally or no) to explain the agency’s trouble-shooting functions. With Y2K approaching, Buchanan has had plenty of opportunities to explain the function of his low-profile agency. In the last six months, EMA has mailed out 8,000 packets telling people how they should prepare for possible interruptions of public services resulting from Millennium-related computer glitches. There are 42 shelters in Memphis that are always on-call, thanks to the efforts of the American Red Cross. Forty churches have also volunteered to serve as shelters should the need arise. Buchanan himself has made regular public appearances, spreading EMA’s official Y2K slogan: “Be Prepared ... Not Scared.” Seated in his cinderblock office, under an oil painting of paramedics tending to a disaster victim, Buchanan says he doesn’t expect much fallout from Y2K. The list of preparations recommended by EMA is really not all that different from those it recommends for other, non-Y2K-related emergencies: $500 cash, a full tank of gas, supplies and medicine for up to a week. Buchanan points to the 1994 ice storm as a reference: “The end of the world isn’t coming if you lose everything,” he says. “A lot of people lost everything then. They lost their lights, their water, their power, and they made it for the three-day cycle.” The EMA office will be fully staffed on New Year’s Eve, all night long until the afternoon of the first day of the New Millennium. Volunteer Ham radio operators will be stationed in hospitals around the city in case any of those facilities lose phone service. Via the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the local EMA will be monitoring Y2K happenings in places like Japan, which will pass into the New Year well before the U.S. The heads of various city agencies and services, meanwhile, will celebrate their holiday in the agency’s “war room,” a fluorescent-lighting and linoleum affair equipped with 40 telephones and a massive grease-board for marking off problems and, hopefully, solutions. “We would open up if there was no Y2K,” Buchanan says, explaining that it will be the volume of downtown revelers, rather than doomsday computer scenarios, that will provide challenges on the eve of January 1. “If you go from Fourth to Main, that section of Beale Street, it safely holds about 28,900 people, that’s inside and outside,” he says. “That’s all the people that should be on that street. There’s going to be, this year, around 75,000 people.” Police Deputy Director David Dugger says the Memphis Police Department is expecting some 100,000 holiday revelers in the downtown area this year — roughly twice as many as last year. MPD will have extra officers on duty to handle the massive crowd flow. And while Buchanan is confident that Y2K-related glitches will not spell the end of the world, he often hears from people who aren’t so sure. One unnamed acquaintance called him up to share his plan for millennial preparedness. “This guy’s got guns. He’s got a hole dug in his backyard to hide. He’s got two months’ worth of food. Five hundred rounds of ammunition. This guy thinks it’s a war,” Buchanan says. “I told him: ‘If you spent this much time preparing to go to heaven, you wouldn’t have to worry about this. You’d go to heaven.’ “I asked him, ‘When’s the last time you went to church?’” In a walk-up office above Victor’s Pizza in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Kevin Pirolo quotes Proverbs, Chapter 22, Verse 3: “A prudent man sees danger and takes refuge; but the simple keep going, and suffer for it.” Pirolo and his wife have been selling diesel generators from this makeshift office across from the courthouse for the last 10 months. Before that, Pirolo was an executive with a telecom firm that was sold to a publicly traded company a little more than a year ago. Signs for his new company, KTD Generators, can be seen on utility poles all over Memphis. “Are You Y2K Prepared? Diesel Generators,” they say, and Pirolo practices what he preaches. “We have a generator at our home,” he says. “We have food. Medicine. It’s an insurance policy. There’s no doubt that there’s going to be problems throughout the United States. Not everywhere, I don’t believe, but there’s no way to know if it’s going to be in your area or not. I view preparing for Y2K as just a prudent thing to do.” Pirolo, who has a background in computer systems as well as telecommunications, says he thinks the Y2K problem is worse than the public has been led to believe. He says his clientele includes a ranking official with the Holly Springs utility company and a range of people who are in the know, many of whom are secretly planning for the coming upheaval and “who don’t want to share with anybody else that they’re even preparing.” “Thirty percent of the generators we’ve sold have gone to computer programmers,” Pirolo says. “Another 40 percent have been either to business owners or business executives, because computer programmers and business executives know that the world is not ready.” In support of this claim, KTD’s brochure includes myriad quotes from governmental sources. “The message is increasingly not just prepare; the message is prepare early,” says John Koskinen, chairman of the President’s Council on Y2K in USA Today. A report by the Senate’s Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem finds that “severe long- and short-term disruptions to supply chains are likely to occur.” “They’re starting to leak out information — a la Monica Lewinsky — leak it out slowly to get the people used it,” Pirolo says, producing a press release from a Canadian power company that says a power generator might be a “wise investment.” “And the reason they haven’t done it up to this point is there’s no use in panicking people.” Pirolo compares it to knowing you’re going to be in a car accident in a month. For most people, there may not be much they can do, even if they had all the facts. “The majority are not going to be prepared, and the best we can do is hope that it’s not bad,” he says, “but it’s going to be way more than a bump in the road.” At the very least, Pirolo thinks a recession is inevitable, since even if things go smoothly here, there will be Y2K-related problems with our trading partners abroad. Not that he thinks things will go smoothly, exactly. “I think that the vast majority of the experts are closest to the truth when they say that 40 to 60 percent of the United States will be without electricity for two to four weeks and the entire U.S. will have rationed electricity for a year,” he says. “That’s probably the closest realistic projection.” “There is, from reliable sources, information that suggests that there are expectations of martial law being declared in certain parts of California if certain circumstances pertain.” “I heard about that,” coos Barbara Luttrell, co-host of Night Search, a local radio show dedicated to conspiratorial tones and discussions of alien visitations and paranormal events that airs Sunday nights on WTCK-AM 1030. This is the “Turn of the Century” show. In a small paneled room with carpet on the walls in Flinn Broadcasting’s complex on Mt. Moriah, Luttrell and co-host Eddie Middleton receive an “ET Insider Report” from a correspondent in San Diego. Vella, a local psychic, stands by in the control room, waiting to give her predictions for the New Year. “What we see here in California,” continues James Bartley, the ET Insider, “is a readiness on the part of the state, local, and federal agencies for things to start to unravel. And the potential for it to unravel and snowball certainly exists. There’s no question about that.” And what if martial law is declared? “I would encourage all the listeners out there to straightaway start destroying any kind of what would be deemed subversive literature, subversive videotapes, what have you,” the Insider advises, “because the new regime that comes in will not look favorably on well-informed people.” The main guest tonight on Night Search’s Y2K show is Llew Wykel, who calls in from Colorado Springs. Wykel, a former Rockwell International systems analyst, had a three-minute-long supernatural experience at Stonehenge some 20 years ago and subsequently became an investigator of the paranormal. Encouragingly, his predictions for Y2K disaster are a good deal less dire than those of the ET Insider. “I put a little list together which I call my CAPP for Y2K,” he says. CAPP stands for Communications, Attention, and Personal Preparation. Wykel essentially recommends the same precautions as official sources, such as storing up a few weeks’ worth of food and water, and is noticeably short on doomsday scenarios. On the other hand, Wykel says he thinks it is an “impossibility that everything will be okay.” “I think we are going to see power failures progressively throughout the world,” Wykel concludes toward the end of the hour-long show. “I think we’re going to see our world’s population plunged into a situation of having to handle that. And we’ll see how prepared all the governments are to handle that. I think we will see a monumental, event-ridden time period.” As Wykel says his goodbyes, urging listeners to stay alert, the white-haired Vella, waiting all this time, makes her way to the mike. “Vella, what do you see happening?” Luttrell asks breathlessly. “Do you think everybody’s going to go nuts?” “Well, no,” Vella says before detailing predictions for the coming year, which include the discovery of a cure for AIDS and the development of new security technologies that will make bank robbery a thing of the past. “So we have got a lot to look forward to in the coming year. Some of our biggest problems are going to be handled.” On the other hand, a little extra food and water never hurt anyone.