February 25, 1999: A Woman's Viewpoint of Y2K - Lia Marie Danks

Art Bell welcomes Lia Marie Danks, author of Building Your Arc, to discuss Y2K preparedness from a practical, household perspective. Danks, a Texas native living in rural Arkansas, shares that her research began three years earlier when a college professor handed her an early draft of Ed Yourdon's Time Bomb 2000. She rates her personal concern between a five and a nine on a ten-point scale, explaining that the uncertainty itself drove her to write a survival guide for everyday families.

Danks offers detailed advice on water storage and purification, recommending expedition-grade filters over cheap store-bought models and explaining that boiling works for temporary situations but cannot remove heavy metals. She shares creative tips, including freezing water in two-liter bottles to both preserve frozen food during outages and provide drinking water as they thaw. She also suggests burying an old refrigerator in the backyard as an improvised root cellar to keep food cool without electricity.

The discussion turns to food storage strategies for people at every income level, from pre-packaged nitrogen-sealed meals to bulk beans and grains stored with oxygen absorber packets. Danks addresses the difficult moral questions of sharing limited supplies, health care vulnerabilities, and the pharmaceutical industry's unreadiness, citing a Senate report that 64 percent of hospitals had no plans to test their Y2K fixes.