"Now it's just me to take care of all this and I can't do it."

http://www.spokane.net/news-story.asp?date=120599&ID=s715674&cat=section.Spokane

-- maid upname (noid@ihope.com), December 05, 1999

Answers

Yep, it sucks goin it alone. He certainly was thorough though.

But rest assured he will have plenty of company now WTSHTF.

-- Hokie (nn@va.com), December 05, 1999.

[Just to give a little friendly help to Bob Swanson, here's the story...:)]

Preparing for Y2K - by himself

Bob Swanson built millennium-proof Fortress of Readiness, Doug Clark says.

Doug Clark - Staff writer
December 5th, 1999.

Underground 3,000-gallon water cistern?

Check.

Fruit orchard? Fish pond?

Double check.

Root cellar? Rice paddy? Rooftop solar panels?

Check. Check. Check.

It's 27 days to the year 2000. Bob Swanson's Fortress of Readiness is lacking in only one major department.

"I'd really like to have a Y2K compliant woman," says Swanson, 44, noting that attempts to locate such a helpmate via the Internet have failed.

"I really don't want to do this alone," he later adds. "It seems pointless."

For over a year, this soft-spoken massage therapist has poured his money and his soul into an elaborate plan to face the so-called millennial mayhem as a self-sufficient man.

The vegetarian erected a greenhouse on his land north of Spokane. He put in a well and stored food.

He stocked a storage building with essentials like hoses and hydraulic fluid and lamp oil. Swanson stockpiled wood. He planned and planted and planned some more. And now, with the end looming in sight, he should be basking in the glow of accomplishment.

He is not. This grand mission, he notes glumly, was supposed to be more of a group project.

"The concept is too much. The responsibility is too much," he worries. "Friends, family and girlfriend didn't want to take it on. I've had to deal with a lot of emotional stress."

Swanson figures he spent $50,000. The price tag could have easily doubled had he not done much of the work himself.

As impressive as it appears, Swanson says his "oasis" requires more effort than a single person can muster. "I set this up for four people. Now it's just me to take care of all this and I can't do it."

Flash back to Swanson's wake-up call: the area's infamous ice storm of 1996.

Like so many others, he was caught unprepared for the dark deep freeze that came when trees and power lines went down like bowling pins.

Swanson spent two weeks huddled in his lightless home, feeding wood to an inefficient fireplace.

That probably set the stage for what happened next.

Swanson came down with a bad case of the Y2K jim-jams. He spent hours on the Internet, studying and reading the words of those doomsayers who consider Y2K the baddest thing since Darth Vader.

This time, Swanson would be prepared. "The only thing bigger than Y2K is the amount of denial," he says of the skeptics and the disinterested.

And so Bob Swanson launched a plan that turned out to be "10 times more work than I could have conceived of."

He ticks off all the things he had to learn: herbology, mechanics, hydraulics, business management, financing, aquatics, electrical engineering, heavy equipment operation...

The transformation of Swanson's property did not go unnoticed. He became the talk of his neighborhood, especially when the huge water tanks he buried were thought to be bomb shelters.

"What if he's like a Noah?" wonders a neighbor, Sue Bates. "What if he's right?"

Besides companionship, the Fortress of Readiness is lacking in another area. Those fancy solar panels lined across a section of his roof work like champs during the summer.

But the many pine trees on Swanson's property block out what little sun rays there are during this overcast time of year.

What will Bob Swanson do if midnight New Year's Eve strikes and the power grid fails?

"I'll be sitting in the dark like everybody else," he says a bit sheepishly.

And what if nothing at all happens?

"Five years from now I'll just laugh at all this," he says. "And I'll be thankful."

Memo: Doug Clark can be reached at (509) 459-5432 or by e-mail at dougc@spokesman.com.

[ENDS] [Interested 'Y2L compliant women' - call now:)!]

-- John Whitley (jwhitley@inforamp.net), December 05, 1999.

His phone will never stop ringing now ...

-- yoohoo (need@Y2K.he-man), December 05, 1999.

Yes, and when he answers the knock on his door, instead of a nubile young sweetie beaming at him through the mist, it'll be burly, tatooed bikers who want a large piece of his action . . . or else.

-- (knockknock@whosthere.com), December 05, 1999.

Bet his ex-girlfriend finds her way back there fast enough, if TSHTF!

-- Dian (bdp@accessunited.com), December 05, 1999.