Remember when Y2K fears gripped SLO County? Here’s a look at the day the world didn’t end
New Year’s Day can be a time to renew, reflect, resolve or regret depending on circumstances.
Paso Robles has a bonfire, the beaches have polar bear dips and it is a big day for sportsball.
As the calendar rolled over to 2000, there was the added wrinkle of computers with code allegedly set to explode as 1999 expired.
For almost a year, news stories warned of the need to update systems to prevent failure.
By and large, the advance work paid off — but inexplicably the Pentagon had a failure in their ground-based system that collected data from spy satellites.
The system crashed at 7 p.m. EST, which was midnight according to Greenwich Mean Time, a standard time measurement for many satellite systems.
They withheld the information until after the big millennial celebrations in New York and Washington finished.
Locally, the transition was quiet as Patrick Pemberton reported in the below article, published on Jan. 2, 2000, in The Tribune:
Y2K arrives not like a lion, but a pussycat
The Y2K survival books are still on display at Barnes & Noble, but few if any are rushing to buy them.
That’s because the lights are still on, cars are still running, and not a single plane has fallen from the sky.
“The rollover for Y2K has gone very well,” said Diana Gapuz, a spokesperson for Pacific Gas and Electric Co. “We did not have any outages in the San Luis Obispo area.”
While some books and television shows forecasted computer and man-induced havoc for the first day of the New Year, it turned out to be just another day. In fact, for a New Year’s, it was a pretty quiet day, police reported.
“It was boring,” said Sgt. Andy Rasmussen of the Sheriff’s Department. “I checked with the deputies and they said it wasn’t even a typical Friday night.”
The Paso Robles Police Department did not report a single arrest for New Year’s Eve and the festivities that followed. Meanwhile, police departments in Atascadero, Morro Bay, Arroyo Grande and Grover Beach reported calm nights with few, if any, arrests.
A few people did wind up in jail, though.
The California Highway Patrol recorded nine arrests for driving under the influence between 6 p.m. Friday and 6 a.m. Saturday, and the San Luis Police Department recorded several arrests after its First Night celebration downtown.
In San Luis Obispo, the activity was calm early on.
”Prior to midnight, it was about average,” said Lt. Gary Orback of the San Luis Obispo police.
Only 13 people had been arrested before the First Night concluded. But more arrests resulted later, as partiers hung around in a stupor.
After the First Night festivities concluded, Orback said, between 20 and 23 people were arrested for public intoxication.
“That’s a fairly substantial number,” he said.
There were a few serious crimes reported as well.The department received one report of an attempted sexual assault and one report of a minor hit-and-run accident.
Firefighters also had a relatively tame night.
The California Department of Forestry reported several calls regarding illegal fireworks, but no significant events.
“That’s a good start to the new year,” said Capt. Don Salisbury.
The CDF, area police and utilities companies reported that there were no computer problems associated with the new year.
As a result, those Y2K books will probably remain on the shelves.
“It’ll be interesting to see if they become collectors’ items at some point,” said Shannon Savage, an assistant manager at the Barnes & Noble in San Luis Obispo.
The books are still on display at the store, she said, but she doesn’t know how long they will be.
She has not seen a lot of Y2K books returned yet, but it’s still early in the year. And there are a lot of them out there.
“We sold a huge amount of them earlier this year,” she said, “when people were getting kind of nervous.”
