State Employee Who Pressed Hawaiian Missile Panic Button Learns His Fate
Panic gripped the population of Hawaii — as well as much of the rest of the country — Saturday morning for more than a half hour after an emergency alert was mistakenly sent out that told Hawaii residents a ballistic missile was inbound for the Pacific island.
The mistake was chalked up to simple human error and the unnamed state employee deemed responsible for worrying the state’s residents with thoughts of impending death has since been reassigned to a job that “does not provide access to the warning system,” according to USA Today.
Shortly after 8:00 a.m. local time Saturday, officials with the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency began to conduct a routine internal test of their emergency alert system, something they have been doing more frequently in light of the threat posed by North Korea.
At 8:07 a.m. the unnamed employee — who has worked with the agency for 10 years — mistakenly pressed a button which sent out the dire message to all cellphones that read: “Missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.”
The agency realized their mistake moments later and issued a correction via Twitter. However, the “all clear” message was not sent out through the emergency alert system until 38 minutes after the initial warning was issued. That message read: “There is no missile threat or danger to the State of Hawaii. Repeat. False Alarm.”
Needless to say, panicked Hawaiians faced with the prospect of imminent death were none too pleased by the mistake, and the agency has been faced with anonymous death threats as well as demands the employee responsible for the mistake be held accountable.
I am meeting this morning with top officials of the State Department of Defense and the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency to determine what caused this morning’s false alarm and to prevent it from happening again.
— Office of the Governor, State of Hawai`i (@GovHawaii) January 13, 2018
“We understand that members of our community are angry about Saturday’s false alarm, and we are looking at these messages as individuals blowing off steam,” HEMA spokesman Richard Rapoza said in a statement. “While we take any threat against our personnel seriously, we are doing our best not to escalate the situation.”
As for the employee who caused the panic, according to NBC News, Rapoza stated, “All we will say is that the individual has been temporarily reassigned within our Emergency Operations Center pending the outcome of our internal investigation, and it is currently in a role that does not provide access to the warning system.”
It was further explained that as part of the routine internal test of the system, the worker accessed a drop-down menu on the computer which offered two options: “Test missile alert” and “Missile alert.”
Obviously, the worker choose the wrong option.
Meanwhile, as HEMA conducts their own internal investigation into what went wrong, the Federal Communications Commission has launched their own investigation into the incident.
The false emergency alert sent yesterday in #Hawaii caused panic across the state and was absolutely unacceptable. Here’s my statement on where the @FCC’s investigation stands. https://t.co/xtXJK8W6He pic.twitter.com/r33TAYZ3lM
— Ajit Pai (@AjitPai) January 14, 2018
FCC chairman Ajit Pai said he believed what occurred was “an honest mistake.” He noted two things that stood out to him as having gone wrong, namely the lack of safeguards to prevent the human error and the fact that a correction wasn’t issued until 38 minutes later.
Pai also likened the incident to the tale of the “boy who cried ‘wolf'” and worried that the mistake could undermine public confidence in the seriousness and veracity of the emergency alert system in the event of a real threat.
To be sure, many will likely take issue with the fact that the employee who caused the unnecessary panic was only reassigned instead of fired — which would have been the likely outcome if the individual was employed by a private company contracted by the state to operate the EAS.
But the individual is an employee of the state, and it is rarely easy to fire a member of the bureaucracy … at least until after an investigation and appeals and other processes are seen through to their conclusion.
Hopefully, once all is said and done, the employee who committed this grave error receives more than a mere slap on the wrist and transfer to a different department in the same agency.
H/T Rare
Please share this on Facebook and Twitter to let everyone know that the individual responsible for sending out the ballistic missile false alarm in Hawaii on Saturday has been reassigned.
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