Hawaii Worker Who Sent Alert Wrongly Thought Missiles on Way

• January 30 2018
• Todd Shields

A Hawaii state worker mistakenly believed a ballistic missile attack was under way when he sent a false alert that rattled residents for 38 minutes until officials could find a way to send a correction, federal regulators said.

A Hawaii state worker mistakenly believed a ballistic missile attack was under way when he sent a false alert that rattled residents for 38 minutes until officials could find a way to send a correction, federal regulators said.

A worker on the day shift Jan. 13 at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency heard a message sent over a speakerphone by the night shift that erroneously included text for a live missile alert, including the words "THIS IS NOT A DRILL,” according to a summary presented at a Federal Communications Commission meeting in Washington on Tuesday.

Hawaiian residents, already anxious about months of nuclear saber-rattling between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, were sent into a panic. The alert went out at 8:07 a.m., setting off a scramble that included Hawaii’s governor, the military’s Pacific Command and Honolulu police, according to the summary prepared by the FCC’s public safety branch.

Operators hadn’t planned for responding to a false alert, and it was only after hurried calls that they agreed they could use the alert system to send a correction -- which went out at 8:45 a.m. In the meantime, one effort to reassure the public faltered as Hawaii’s governor lost his Twitter password, delaying his tweet until 8:24, or 15 minutes after being notified.

The FCC’s investigation is continuing, and the agency wants to know what went wrong to avoid a repeat, said FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.

“Panic-stricken citizens called their families to say what they believed were their last words, and some even resorted to jumping into manholes to find shelter,” Pai said. “The only thing that struck the island was outrage -- and rightly so.”

The FCC report offered details of the 38-minute period, including jammed phone lines at the emergency agency as citizens called, with some unable to get through, and a hurried meeting to determine a correction that met the criteria of a civil emergency message -- one of the event codes used to initiate alerts. At 8:31 a.m. a worker logged into the system and created the correction messages that eventually were sent.

“Many things went wrong in Hawaii,” Pai said. “We simply need to identify the problems in order to fix them -- not just in Hawaii, but anywhere else where they may exist.”