Y2K-Ready or Not, He Plans to Talk Through Night

“I will be on the air from 7 at night till 3 in the morning, so my celebration is set,” Art Bell said lightly. “Unless I go off the air, in which case I’ll drink champagne and toast the darkness.”

Bell, the king of night-owl radio, was talking about New Year’s Eve. In a first for his syndicated talk program, he’ll start broadcasting from his remote home base in the Nevada desert three hours ahead of his usual 10 p.m. opening Friday. Just in case.

Despite the provocative phrasing, hinting at some sort of massive signal disruption, Bell did not make the beginning of the millennium sound like the end of the world. Not once did he mention aliens, crop circles or doomsday--frequent topics of discussion with his on-air callers--and there was no edge in his voice when a simple “Happy New Year” wish to him evoked a quiet “Same to you.”

Talking by phone, the seasoned radio host, whose “Coast to Coast AM” reaches 9 million listeners each week and 485 stations, including KABC-AM (790) here, sounded altogether reasoned.

“I want to be there if something happens,” Bell said. “Obviously I’m going to be using this time to monitor everything under the sun that’s going on, so if something does happen, I’m going to be there to cover it.

“I know what the potential is. The potential is from nothing--and everybody has a great night--to disaster. The United States is probably the best-prepared nation in the world right now . . . but nobody really knows for sure what’s going to happen.”

As Bell explains, when “Coast to Coast AM” begins at 7 p.m., “the millennium will be somewhere out in the Atlantic. Two hours into the show, it turns midnight on the East Coast. By then, of course, we’ll have information from Australia and from Europe on what has happened, and we might have some sense of what to expect.”

As is his art, Bell spun a web of mystery. He raised “the possibility” of power outages and said that if electricity is down for a while, that could trigger other downhill events.

With him in the studio at his home in Pahrump, Nev., 50 miles northwest of Las Vegas--besides his wife, Ramona, who generally sits in to keep him company--will be Gordon-Michael Scallion, a self-described prophet, or “intuitive,” who for years has predicted big quakes on the so-called Pacific ring of fire, including Los Angeles.

“He’s probably one of the best-known, best-respected intuitives in America, if not the world. He 1/8turned down 3/8 a lot of television offers for that night in order to come on my program,” Bell said. Scallion will be on hand for the first three hours.

Does Bell believe the Big One could come that night? “No,” he replied. “No, I don’t necessarily. What I do expect is the possibility of power problems as midnight approaches. There are hundreds of thousands of embedded chips, and nobody knows what the hell is going to happen with those. This is not software. These are actual computer chips in power companies’ switching equipment, and the power companies have not done a lot of remediation.”

Bell pointed to the summer of 1996, when “the western third of the United States went down because of one little power company up in Idaho. And, in fact, western Canada and western Mexico. The whole damn grid across the West went down.”

“The power companies have said they’re 1/8Y2K 3/8-compliant, and they’re more worried about the billing,” Bell continued. “But personally, I’m worried about the power, because without power, there’s no water. Without water, there’s no sewage. It’s a chain reaction.

“Power is what pumps your water, and when you don’t have water, you can’t flush a toilet. . . . And if the power goes off, I think people are not going to regard that so well. I’m more concerned about people, about the social reaction, than I am 1/8about 3/8 machines.”

Does he mean riots, stuff like that?

“They’re not unknown, are they?” he said, not really meaning it as a question. “And people seem to take advantage of any opportunity to go collect their favorite color TV.”

Is he apprehensive? “No, I’m aware 1/8and 3/8 prepared. I have solar and wind power so I can just throw a switch and I’m off the grid. . . . I’ve taken all the prudent precautions that even our government and 1/8the Federal Emergency Management Agency 3/8 and the Red Cross 1/8advise 3/8: that people should prepare as though they’re preparing for a bad blizzard. Plus a little.”

Beyond the power issue, Bell said, he worries about Jan. 3, the Monday when people return to work. “I think that a lot of small- and medium-sized businesses, and maybe even some big ones, are going to find out that their databases don’t work, and then you’ve got sort of a domino effect through the economy.”

Barring the unforeseen, of course, Bell himself will be back on the air Monday night.