The day the world didn’t end; special Y2K Herald edition a time capsule from 25 years ago

By Lethbridge Herald on January 1, 2025.

Former Herald employee Wayne Dwornik, at left, and newsroom editor Scott Sakatch, who worked as a desk editor back in 2000, look at copies of 25 year old special edition Lethbridge Heralds from Dec. 31, 1999 and Jan. 1, 2000. Herald photo by Toyin Obatusin

When you think about things to do on New Year’s Eve, chances are your mind doesn’t turn to sitting in a bunker under City Hall pondering the end of modern civilization. 

But that’s exactly what happened in Lethbridge 25 years ago as the city braced for the possibility that every computer system in the world would shut down when their internal clocks rolled over to 12:01 a.m. on Jan. 1, 2000. The so-called Y2K bug—a software glitch where computers couldn’t tell the difference between the years 1900 and 2000—had experts around the world predicting potential disaster on New Year’s Day.

“I remember it was a really big deal,” says Wayne Dwornik, who worked in the Lethbridge Herald sale department at the time. “Of course, you look back now and see that it didn’t actually amount to anything, but we didn’t know that at the time.”

Dwornik recently retrieved a bagged copy of two special editions of the Herald, printed on Dec. 31, 1999 and Jan. 1, 2000 from his basement. The editions featured special sections focusing on the city’s history and its future and thousands of southern Albertans got their own bagged copies as mementos of the new year, new century and new millennium.

“I wonder how many people still have theirs sitting around somewhere,” says Dwornik. “It’s actually a time capsule, really, of what was going on at the time.”

He decided that the 25th anniversary of the new millennium would be the perfect time to break the seal and take a look back in time, so he brought one of his sealed bags into the Herald offices earlier this week to open. The front page of the Jan. 1 edition features a huge, one-word headline in red across the entire width: “WHEW!” it read, letting readers know that the city—and the world—had escaped the Y2K bug relatively unscathed.

Herald reporters spent that New Year’s Eve embedded with local officials while editors in the newsroom monitored reports from around the world, waiting to see what would happen.

“It was a memorable night for sure,” says Scott Sakatch, who was a desk editor at the time. “Everyone was asking themselves, ‘what if?’ We had to push back the deadline until after midnight just in case, which I’m pretty sure had never been done before.”

Then-Mayor David Carpenter and senior members of city administration gathered in a command centre in the basement of the former City Hall building on 3rd Avenue South on New Year’s Eveto deal with potential problems. Fire and emergency crews stood by, ready to jump into action at a moment’s notice. Night clubs that normally would have been full of New Year’s revellers were quieter than usual as everyone watched the clock tick ever closer to midnight.

And then…nothing.

Sakatch, who recently returned to the Herald newsroom as editor, can’t help but chuckle at the memory.

“It ended up being the biggest non-event in history,” he says. “We had a pretty good idea that things would be okay when Australia and other countries reached midnight without any major incidents, but we couldn’t be 100 percent sure it wouldn’t happen here. I suppose it’s the old adage about hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.”

Dwornik points out that thousands of copies of the special bagged editions were sold, and he hopes people will consider opening them like he did.

“I think 25 years is a good milestone,” he says.