Y2a

In NBC's "Y2K," a nuclear power plant near Seattle is only seconds away from a potentially catastrophic meltdown. As revelers welcome the new year at Times Square in Manhattan, the entire Northeast suffers a paralyzing blackout. An airliner struggles to make a safe landing at a Southeastern airport where runway lights are suddenly dark. At a Texas prison, the cell doors swing open and rioting convicts burst out.

After spending $10 billion to ensure that New Year's Eve will be a nonevent for their computer systems, U.S. banks are nevertheless embarking on the most exhaustive and, in many ways, imaginative disaster-preparedness effort in their history. San Francisco-based Wells Fargo Bank stands ready to deploy a small fleet of mobile automated teller machines--housed in specially fitted vans--in the event they are needed. U.S.

Even as U.S. military forces lead the NATO offensive against Slobodan Milosevic, they are also preparing to do battle with another dangerous foe: the Y2K bug lurking in the computers that run much of the military's high-tech weaponry. Government agencies large and small are struggling to avert the Y2K computer problem, but nowhere are the stakes higher and the situation more technologically daunting than at the Department of Defense.

By this time last year, when most of America was barely waking up to the Y2K bug, this southern Oregon city had been feeling millennial jitters for months. Hundreds of people attended public meetings on the Y2K computer problem. The mayor's wife conducted a 12-part seminar in her living room on how to survive societal collapse. Business was booming at stores selling wood stoves, dried food and solar collectors.