Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) on Saturday said a false alarm warning Hawaii of an inbound missile threat was “totally inexcusable.”
“The whole state was terrified,” Schatz tweeted. “There needs to be tough and quick accountability and a fixed process.”
There is no missile threat. It was a false alarm based on a human error. There is nothing more important to Hawai‘i than professionalizing and fool-proofing this process.
— Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) January 13, 2018
AGAIN FALSE ALARM. What happened today is totally inexcusable. The whole state was terrified. There needs to be tough and quick accountability and a fixed process.
— Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) January 13, 2018
The initial alert sent out to cell phones read, “Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.”
A second alert declared the first warning a “false alarm” and said, “There is no missile threat or danger to the State of Hawaii.”
Wonderful.
But in the Trump era of diplomacy, there was better than a 50:50 chance of incoming NorKo missiles. Or Chinese. Or Russian. Or Mexican. or Norwegian. etc. etc. etc.
Yeah, I heard that the Norwegians send only their best…
Wow – that’s a pretty big fuck-up.
Needlessly terrorizing everyone is, of course, a big part of why it’s so bad.
But on top of that, false alarms may cause people to (at least initially) ignore such alerts in the event of a real emergency. In other words, the boy-who-cried-wolf problem.
Everyone in the know is well aware the real danger is Namibia.