Dem Governor of Hawaii Didn't Notify Public of False Alarm Because He Forgot Password
As you may perhaps have heard, the fine people of America’s 50th state, Hawaii, were recently informed that the apocalypse was nigh upon them via text message.
Early on Saturday, Jan. 13, hundreds of thousands of residents received a text message that said, “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” It turned out someone had hit the wrong button on the state’s emergency system, and 40 minutes later authorities sent out a text message saying “J/K! No actual ballistic missile. Our bad.” (Or something to that effect.)
“I deeply apologize for the trouble and heartbreak we caused today,” Hawaii Emergency Management Agency administrator Vern Miyagi said. “This is my team. We made a mistake. We are going to process this and study this to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
However, the chorus of mistakes was amplified by the fact that there was no message from HI-EMA for 38 minutes, nor any message from Hawaii’s governor, Democrat David Ige, via social media. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard was able to almost immediately convey via Twitter that the attack was a hoax, so why not Ige?
Well, as it turns out, he forgot his password.
Seriously.
After Ige’s State of the State address on Monday, reporters asked him about the delay even though he knew two minutes after the message was sent out that it was a false alarm, according to the Honolulu Star Advertiser.
“I was in the process of making calls to the leadership team both in Hawaii Emergency Management as well as others,” Ige said at first.
And then boom went the dynamite: “I have to confess that I don’t know my Twitter account log-ons and the passwords, so certainly that’s one of the changes that I’ve made,” Ige said. “I’ve been putting that on my phone so that we can access the social media directly.”
“The focus really was on trying to get as many people informed about the fact that it was a false alert,” Ige added. I mean, as soon as he got his password straightened out, that is.
Gov. David Ige explains that part of the delay in notifying the public that the Jan. 13 missile alert was a false alarm was because he did not know his Twitter password. pic.twitter.com/S3tmoswOpZ
— SA Politics (@starpolitics) January 22, 2018
Behind the “Dr. Strangelove”-esque comedy of errors that occurred a week and a half ago is the sobering fact that the people of Hawaii really thought they were in the midst of “Dr. Strangelove.”
And the systemic insufficiencies revealed by the incident — as well as the dismal response by everyone involved — would be laughable if they hadn’t plunged a swath of an American state into chaos.
According to NBC News, the whole incident was precipitated by a system with a drop-down menu that allows individuals to pick either “Test missile alert” and “Missile alert.” Instead of picking the internal test option, he instead picked the latter actual missile alert. Quality interface design in action.
Furthermore, there didn’t seem to be a particularly efficient way to cancel and retract the alert. The emergency worker who screwed up has merely been reassigned to a position where he doesn’t have access to the system for now, which I suppose speaks to just how hard public sector unions make it to fire genuine screwups.
And on top of that, the governor doesn’t know his freaking Twitter password.
In the end, all I have to say is this: After David Ige’s Twitter disaster in the midst of mass panic caused by a spurious ballistic missile alert, I never want to hear another disparaging word from any registered Democrat about “covfefe” ever again.
H/T The Daily Wire
Please like and share on Facebook and Twitter if you think, given Gov. Ige’s ineptitude, the password was probably something like “12345” anyway.
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