Tag: missile attack

Fake North Korean Missile Attack on Hawaii Causes Mass Panic

| January 14, 2018

Here is the aftermath from the mass panic caused on Hawaii from a fake North Korea missile attack notice sent to everyone’s smartphones:

The false emergency alert apparently happened because “the wrong button was pushed,” Hawaii House Speaker Scott Saiki said in a statement.

“This system we have been told to rely upon failed and failed miserably today,” Saiki said. “I am deeply troubled by this misstep that could have had dire consequences.”

He added, “Apparently, the wrong button was pushed and it took over 30 minutes for a correction to be announced. Parents and children panicked during those 30 minutes.”

The emergency alert was sent to people’s mobile phones in Hawaii starting at about 8:07 a.m. local time with the startling words all in caps, “Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.”

Shortly after, a spokesman for the U.S. Pacific Command, Dave Benham, told ABC News in a statement that no ballistic missile threat to Hawaii was detected.

“Earlier message was sent in error. State of Hawaii will send out a correction message as soon as possible,” Benham said.  (…….)

Gov. David Ige said at a press conference Saturday afternoon that the error happened during a routine procedure that occurs as workers are changing shifts.

“An error was made in emergency management which allowed this false alarm to be sent,” Ige said. “It was a procedure that occurs at the change of shift, enabling [us] to make sure that the system is working, and an employee pushed the wrong button.”  [Good Morning America]

You can read more at the link, but you would think sending out an alert like this would not be as simple as clicking a mouse button to prevent a mistake like this from happening.  Additionally the fact that it took so long to send a correction message shows whoever was coming on and off shift were not even aware of the error they made while everyone else in Hawaii was in a mass panic:

“We grabbed all the food and water we had, the kids grabbed their stuffed animals and we headed to the lobby,” Mulder said. “Kids crying everywhere, no one knew what was happening. We made our way to an internal bathroom and huddled there with some other people. It was probably 30 minutes between the alert and when we knew it was a false alarm.”

One video making the rounds on social media showed children being lowered into a storm drain for safety.  [Fortune]

It is not good with the emergency management team for the State of Hawaii doesn’t even know there is an emergency going on to fix their error until 38 minutes after the fact.  And if anyone was wondering, it did not take very long for Democrats to blame President Trump for this:

Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, one of the first to confirm that the missile alert was false, later said on CNN that Trump was “taking too long” to deal with tensions surrounding North Korea, which contributed to dialing up the panic from Saturday’s incident.

“You’d be angry just like I am,” said Gabbard, a Democrat and a member of the House Armed Services Committee.  [Fortune]

As if North Korea did not make threats against Hawaii when Barack Obama was President.

Probably the worst thing about this is now people are not going to trust the warnings they receive from the State of Hawaii anymore because of this incompetence.