Hawaii mistakenly warns of missile
‘We’re just going to be strong for our kids until the end,’ Toronto mother says
HONOLULU— A push alert that warned of a ballistic missile heading straight for Hawaii and sent residents into a full-blown panic Saturday was issued by mistake, state emergency officials said.
The emergency alert, which was sent to cellphones just before 8:10 a.m., said in all caps, “Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.” The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency tweeted there was no threat about 10 minutes after the initial alert, but that didn’t reach people who aren’t on the social media platform. A revised alert informing of the “false alarm” didn’t reach phones until 38 minutes later, according to the time stamp on images people shared on social media.
Agency spokesperson Richard Repoza confirmed it was a false alarm and said the agency is trying to determine what happened.
Toronto couple Alison Mann and her husband, Brad Fauteux, on vacation in Hawaii with their two children, were renting a house in Kuliouou, 15 minutes outside Honolulu.
They were in their bedroom, talking about the activities they planned on doing later that day when they received the alert on their phones.
“My throat was dry. I was terrified. I was shaking,” Mann recalled. She said the alert was also being broadcast on television. They called their children and told them to start packing their bags with passports, water and some food. The owner of the home came to check on them a few minutes later and instructed them to stay calm and wait for instructions.
At that point, Mann said their children, ages 11 and 9, were crying.
“They kept saying ‘We just want to go home. What is happening?’ ” she said, adding she and her husband could only hug them tight and whisper that everything would be OK. But Mann was far from calm. “Twenty minutes of my life I thought we’re probably not going to survive this with our family,” said Mann, who was still choked up hours later while recalling the incident. “We’re just going to be strong for our kids until the end.
“There is nothing like something like that to make you reevaluate, reassess your life, your family and the things you value.”
Mann said they learned the alert was a false alarm from the homeowner. They stayed inside the house for a couple of hours, messaging friends and family at home in Toronto to let them know they were OK.
What exactly happened wasn’t clear to anybody — House Speaker Scott Saiki said someone pushed the wrong button, and the White House said the episode was “purely a state exercise.” The incident prompted defence agencies including the Pentagon and the U.S. Pacific Command to issue the same statement, that they had “detected no ballistic missile threat to Hawaii.”
But for 38 minutes, it seemed like the world was about to end in Hawaii, an island paradise already jittery over the threat of nuclear-tipped missiles from North Korea.
Michael Kucharek of the North American Aerospace Defence Command in Colorado Springs, Colorado, said NORAD and the U.S. Northern Command are still trying to verify what happened in Hawaii — but that “NORAD did not see anything that indicated any sort of threat to Hawaii.”
The White House said U.S. President Donald Trump, who is in Florida, was briefed on the false alert.
Saiki, the House speaker, said the system Hawaii residents have been told to rely on failed miserably. He also took emergency management officials to task for taking 30 minutes to issue a correction, prolonging panic.
“Clearly, government agencies are not prepared and lack the capacity to deal with emergency situations,” he said in a statement.
Workers at a golf club huddled in a kitchen fearing the worst. Professional golfer Colt Knost, staying at Waikiki Beach during the PGA Tour’s Sony Open, said “everyone was panicking” in the lobby of his hotel.
Hawaii U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz tweeted the false alarm was “totally inexcusable” and was caused by human error.
“There needs to be tough and quick accountability and a fixed process,” he wrote. Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai also took to social media to announce the panel would launch an investigation. With files from Bryann Aguilar and the New York Times