Don't blame Trump for this as he was golfing at the time:
"A senior U.S. official told The Post that Trump was at his Florida golf course at Mar-a-Lago when the scare happened and knew “soon after” that the alerts had been determined false."
"EMA Administrator Mr. Vern Miyagi said that there was no template in the system for an alert retraction, and so the all-clear message had to be manually entered and activated, accounting for some of the delay."
I understand there was NO "This was a false alarm" message, nor any other "Free Text" message option allowing the state bureaucrats to actually "update" or "inform the public" of any new information as this, or other emergency (tsunami, volcano, tornado (unlikely in HI), typhoon or forest fires or meteor impact) developed.
"Sure, we will give you an automatic alarm message., Then, we cannot give you any more information"
Typical pluggin' bureaucrat with a tens of millions budget. And no brain.
Several years back, I was sitting here at my desk and started hearing sirens. Not the normal emergency vehicle sirens, but something stationary. Nobody in the office knew what they were for or anything.
So I called the city, they didn't know anything about any sirens going off or what they meant, they did know they weren't city sirens.
I think I finally contacted the county, and learned those were generic "emergency" sirens, used for tornadoes, terrorists, attacking Godzillas or whatever the emergency of the moment was. And that was their periodic test.
I thought it was funny to have an emergency warning system when nobody had the slightest clue what to do when they heard it.
We have sirens for the nuke plants but I think if you are within earshot when they go super critical you are to close for the sirens to do any good. Wait, what's that sound in the distance?
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The Help for this program was created in Windows Help format, which depends on a feature that isn't included in this version of Windows.
Several years back, I was sitting here at my desk and started hearing sirens. Not the normal emergency vehicle sirens, but something stationary. Nobody in the office knew what they were for or anything.
So I called the city, they didn't know anything about any sirens going off or what they meant, they did know they weren't city sirens. I think I finally contacted the county, and learned those were generic "emergency" sirens, used for tornadoes, terrorists, attacking Godzillas or whatever the emergency of the moment was. And that was their periodic test. I thought it was funny to have an emergency warning system when nobody had the slightest clue what to do when they heard it.
Good point. Usually these tests are scheduled, for example "The sirens are tested at 10:00 a.m. on the first Tuesday of each month from March to October."
We want to point fingers. Someone made a mistake a pushed the wrong button in a poorly designed interface. It's easy to point the finger at them.
But there is also the current state of the world political affairs that contributed to how this alert was perceived and received by the public. The "nuclear d**k swinging contest" approach of a certain leader to mitigating this threat definitely factored into the response to the incident. Two years ago this would have been met more with skepticism and questions than it would have been with people popping manhole covers and going into the sewer to try to survive.
Turns out the message was sent intentionally by someone who heard a recorded message that stated "This is not a drill" during a drill (full timeline within):
• The midnight shift supervisor plays a recording over the phone that properly includes the drill language “EXERCISE, EXERCISE, EXERCISE,” but also erroneously contains the text of an EAS message for a live ballistic missile alert, including the language, “THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” The recording does not follow the script contained in HI-EMA’s standard operating procedure for this drill.
• The day shift warning officers receive this recorded message on speakerphone.
• While other warning officers understand that this is a drill, the warning officer at the alert origination terminal claimed to believe, in a written statement provided to HI-EMA, that this was a real emergency, not a drill.
• This day shift warning officer responds, as trained for a real event, by transmitting a live incoming ballistic missile alert to the State of Hawaii.
A report today mentioned that the button pusher had been fired, apparently this was not the first time he had heard the Phrase " This is not a drill" and had pushed the button.
B.E.
You are judged not by what you know, but by what you can do.
One would have thought, and hoped, that the idiot that kept the idiot on the job that the idiot was incapable of performing would have also been fired.
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
The following from HotAir.com, written by Jazz Shaw. It confirms the employee (male or female is never made clear) apparently MADE THE SAME ERROR several times before!
Okay, “fired” probably isn’t the technical term for it. The worker in question actually submitted his resignation. But do we really think this was a decision he arrived at on his own? Unlikely at best. But the Washington Post reports that the letter of resignation was accepted by the boss and he’s no longer working there. (I’ll repeat the fact that we don’t actually know the worker’s gender, but I’m going with “he” by default. My apologies if this turns out to be a woman.)
But there’s another, somewhat more disturbing angle to this story, which started out as terrifying but has grown more and more bizarre since the original incident. This wasn’t the first time that this particular worker had been in trouble for “confusing” drills with real-world threats. And he’s been a “source of concern” to HEMA management for a decade. (Washington Examiner)
Hawaii Gov. David Ige, a Democrat, apologized for the incident and said it was a “terrifying day when our worst nightmares appeared to become a reality.”
The report from Hawaii officials found that the employee who sent out the false alert earlier this month “has been a source of concern” to other workers “for over 10 years,” according to the Washington Post.
The worker also mixed up real-world scenarios and drills “on at least two separate occasions.”
Allahpundit already looked at the alarming claim that the worker allegedly believed there was a missile heading their way when he “pushed the wrong button.” That’s disturbing enough. But to find out that he confused the real world with some dystopian hellscape fantasy twice before and was still the person responsible for operating that warning system means the fault for this debacle shifts to his superiors.
From the beginning, there were some other, more benign possibilities under discussion. Maybe he was new on the job and wasn’t used to the routine. Perhaps the computer system is poorly designed with a confusing interface making it easy to screw up like that. But now we know that he had been there for at least ten years and had made this sort of error before. Presumably, it never got all the way to the stage of sending out the alert or we’d have known about it, but it was obviously close enough for them to record the incidents.
Knowing all that, how is it that he was still allowed to run that alert software? Surely the complete freakout which followed the false alarm can’t have taken them by surprise. They had to know what a complete disaster that would lead to, right? Couldn’t the worker have been given some other duty in the chain of command which didn’t leave him at the keyboard when the final Go/No Go decision was made?
The worker’s careeer there may be over but the investigation clearly isn’t. If his is the only head to roll I’ll be surprised. Somebody was in charge of this operation and knew there were problems at that work station. And they’re probably going to have to be held accountable.
I'm with TenPenny on this. Perhaps drill messages should never state that they aren't. Obviously we need to blame the one pushing the button rather than the one crafting or choosing the message.
From another report,
When the drill was started a notice would appear only visible to operators ( button pushers.), stating that a drill was imminent and to ignore the phrase " This is not a drill.". Apparently on at least two occasions the operator in question had missed the preamble to the drill.
B.E.
You are judged not by what you know, but by what you can do.
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