We have a local group here in the area that each year travels around town firing their muskets and shotguns. They start at midnight on the New Year and go until the end of the day. It sounds like you're in the middle of a battlefield when they do it. My younger son was 12 years old at Y2K and he had never heard the New Years Shooters. When they did it close by our house that year, he thought the earth was blowing up so he shouted out "it's Y2K" and hid under his bed.
I know in the couple of years leading up to Y2K, our software venders did a bunch of reprograming to allow for 4 digit years in dates because they said it everything would re-set back to 1900 at the turn of the century if we continued using 2 digits for the year.