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Hawaii official who sent false missile alert believed attack was happening Hawaii official who sent false missile alert thought islands were under attack, inquiry finds
(about 4 hours later)
False alarm went uncorrected for 38 minutes and caused panic False alarm earlier this month went uncorrected for nearly 40 minutes
Governor said employee pressed the wrong button by mistakeGovernor said employee pressed the wrong button by mistake
Reuters in Washington Julian Borger in Washington
Tue 30 Jan 2018 17.08 GMT Tue 30 Jan 2018 18.39 GMT
First published on Tue 30 Jan 2018 17.08 GMT
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The US government has said that the government employee who issued a false missile warning to Hawaiians mistakenly believed an attack was in progress. The false alert of an imminent missile strike that sent Hawaiians scurrying for bomb shelters earlier this month was sent out by an official who believed the islands were really under attack, according to a government report on the incident.
The false alarm, which went uncorrected for 38 minutes after being transmitted to mobile phones and broadcast stations, caused widespread panic across the state. It took nearly 40 minutes to put out the all-clear, because the agency had not rehearsed what to do in the event of a false alarm and found lines jammed by anxious callers. Efforts by Hawaii’s governor to correct the mistake were delayed because he did not know his Twitter login.
The Federal Communications Commission blamed the error in part on a miscommunication and a lack of supervision of a drill by the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency to practice for the event of a real attack. The report by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released on Tuesday said the error was the result of misunderstanding among employees of Hawaii’s Emergency Management Agency during a shift change.
The employee who transmitted the alert said in a written statement to Hawaii that he or she believed it was an actual alert, rather than a drill, and clicked yes in response to a prompt that read: “Are you sure that you want to send this alert?” the FCC said in a presentation. When he was handing over at 8am, the outgoing supervisor told the incoming day shift supervisor that he was going to conduct a ballistic missile preparedness drill.
The drill recording did not follow the standard script for a drill but included the phrase: “This is not a drill.” It ended with the phrase: “Exercise, exercise, exercise.” The officer who issued the alert heard “This is not a drill” but did not hear “Exercise, exercise, exercise,” he told Hawaii in a written statement. “But there was a miscommunication,” said James Wiley, an FCC legal counsel who presented the report. “The incoming day shift supervisor thought that the midnight shift supervisor intended to conduct a drill for the midnight shift warning officers only (those ending their shift) – not for the day shift officers (those beginning their shift).”
Hawaii’s governor has said the employee pressed the wrong button by mistake. As a result, the day shift supervisor was not in the right place to make sure that his watch officers understood it was just a drill.
The FCC said it had been unable to interview the employee who issued the alert. The FCC said “a combination of human error and inadequate safeguards contributed to the transmission of this false alert.” It also said Hawaii’s “lack of preparation for how to respond to this transmission of a false alert” was largely responsible for the 38-minute delay in correcting it. According to the FCC account, the night supervisor started the drill by calling the day shift warning officers, who had not been told their was to be an exercise, and pretending to be US Pacific Command.
Hawaii plans to issue a separate report later on Tuesday. The supervisor played a recorded message which began and ended with the words “exercise, exercise, exercise”. However, the main text of the message was not the same as that used for a routine drill, and instead followed a script used for an actual alert, including the sentence: “This is not a drill.”
Somehow, one of the day shift warning officers heard “this is not a drill”, but not the words “exercise, exercise, exercise”, and “therefore believed that the missile threat was real.”
The officer who had misheard was sitting at that terminal used to send out alerts, and chose to send a live alert from a drop-down menu.
A prompt appeared on the screen saying: “Are you sure that you want to send this alert?” and at 8.07 am, the officer clicked ‘yes’, sending out an all-capitals text message to mobile phones all over the state, saying: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”
The the alert came at a time of high tensions over North Korea’s nuclear programme, heightening the ensuing panic, as people sought shelter or tried to find other family members, fearing they could be living their last moments.
“It was definitely kind of a panic zone,” Ashly Trask, who lives on the island of Kauai, said at the time. “Everyone knows you have about 15 minutes until detonation, and no one knows where it will land.”
The initial official account of the mistake suggested that a watch officer had sent a live alert by mistake by clicking the wrong online button. In its report on Tuesday, the FCC indicated it could not “fully evaluate” this new version of events as it had not been able to interview the hapless warning officer who had actually sent out the alert. The report did not say why the officer could not be reached.
The FCC report also looked at why it took so long to cancel the alert. Officials in the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency knew immediately the alert was a mistake, but it took 38 minutes for the error to be rectified on the public alert system.
Further alerts were stopped after five minutes, but the cancellationdoes not automatically generate an “all clear” message, or recall the earlier false alerts. A further 13 minutes was spent trying to get through to radio and TV stations to inform them of the error.
Then a Facebook and Twitter message was put up on the emergency management agency’s accounts. It was not until 8.24am that the corrective message was retweeted by the Hawaii governor, David Ige.
The FCC report notes drily: “The governor has stated that he was unable to do this earlier because he did not know his Twitter password.”
It was not until 8.27 – 20 minutes after the false alarm – that an agency meeting was held to discuss putting out a correction on the statewide emergency alert system, but it took from 8.31am to 8.45 to log on to the appropriate software, create the correction and then send it out, in part because there was no template for a false alert message.
Missile defence drills have been suspended until a full inquiry is completed.
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