Hawaii panics as false missile alert is issued
A MOBILE phone push alert warning of a ballistic missile heading straight for Hawaii sent residents and tourists into a full-blown panic yesterday morning — before 38 minutes later, state emergency officials admitted that it was all a terrible mistake.
The emergency notice was triggered after an “employee pushed the wrong button” during a shift change at the state’s emergency management agency, Governor David Ige said at a press conference in Honolulu.
Residents of the island state, as well as thousands of tourists, woke at 8:07am local time to alerts lighting up their mobile phones and interrupting TV programming about a “ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii” and the warning that “this is not a drill” but an “extreme alert.”
Emergency authorities reversed the warning with a second mobile alert sent 38 minutes later confirming “no missile threat” and “false alarm”.
In a statement, the White House said President Trump had been briefed on what it described as “the state of Hawaii’s emergency manage- ment exercise”. Trump spent much of Saturday at one of his golf courses in Florida.
Residents were terrified by the alert. Suzanne Mulder, a tourist in Honolulu with her family, said her 10-year-old-son noticed the mobile alert.
“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 on social media showed children being lowered into a storm drain for safety.
Hawaii State Representative Matt LoPresti, described his family’s reaction upon receiving the alert: “We took shelter immediately... in the bathtub with my children, saying our prayers.
“I was wondering why we couldn’t hear the emergency sirens. I didn’t understand that. And that was my first clue that maybe something was wrong, whether a hack or an error. But we took it as seriously as a heart attack,”
Hawaii has been on high alert given claims by North Korea that its newest intercontinental ballistic missile could fly 13,000km. That would put even mainland US within range from Pyongyang. The isolated nation conducted its sixth and most powerful nuclear test on September 3, and launched more than a dozen missiles in the past year.
If North Korea were to launch a missile at Hawaii and the warning system worked correctly, locals would have 20 minutes advance warning.
“At a time of heightened tensions, we need to make sure all information released to the community is accurate,” Senator Mazie Hirono, a Democrat, said on Twitter. “We need to make sure it never happens again.”
Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, one of the first to confirm that the alert was false, later said on CNN that Trump was “taking too long” to deal with tensions surrounding North Korea, which contributed to the panic.
“I think first you’d be horrified and, second, once you realized it’s not going to happen, now the anger is going to come,” she added.
Hawaii, a chain of islands in the Pacific Ocean, has a population of about 1.4 million people and is home to the US Pacific Command, the Navy’s Pacific Fleet and other elements of the US military.
The US Navy base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was the target of the surprise attack by Japan on December 7, 1941, that drew the United States into World War II.
In November, Hawaii said it would resume monthly statewide testing of Cold Warera nuclear attack warning sirens for the first time in at least a quarter of a century, in preparation for a possible missile strike from North Korea, state officials said at the time.