Hawaii! H-bomb in 15 minutes! Run! Hide!

[JackRiddler]

http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-me ... elebrated/

[Cordelia]

Governor took 15 minutes to announce missile alert was false

By AUDREY McAVOY Associated Press | Saturday, January 20, 2018

HONOLULU — The Hawaii National Guard’s top commander said Friday he told Gov. David Ige that a missile alert was a false alarm two minutes after it went out statewide. But the governor didn’t tell the public until 15 minutes later.

Maj. Gen. Arthur “Joe” Logan told state lawmakers at a hearing that he called the governor at 8:09 a.m. Saturday after speaking to a supervisor at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, whose employee accidentally sent the alert.

Ige spokeswoman Cindy McMillan said the governor had to track her down to prepare a message for the public. She said the governor’s communications team handles his social media.

Ige’s office relayed an Emergency Management Agency tweet about the false alarm at 8:24 a.m. Six minutes later, a notice went up on his Facebook page.

Rep. Kaniela Ing, who questioned Logan about the alert mishap, said he wanted to ask the governor himself about the events. But Ige had left the hearing by the time it was Ing’s turn to ask questions.

McMillan said Ige departed the hearing early because he had “various things to do.” In response to criticism from Ing and other lawmakers that Ige left prematurely, McMillan said: “He is the governor. He has other duties to attend to today.”

McMillan would not say what other obligations the governor had.

Lawmakers held their hearing nearly a week after a state employee caused widespread panic and confusion by mistakenly sending an emergency alert to mobile devices and TV and radio stations warning of an incoming missile strike.

A corrected alert was not sent to mobile devices for nearly 40 minutes because state workers had no prepared message for a false alarm.

Hawaii emergency workers immediately started calling city and county officials to tell them there was no threat. They posted social media messages about 13 minutes after the erroneous warning.

Brig. Gen. Kenneth Hara, Logan’s deputy, told lawmakers the state is exploring changing the emergency management agency’s computer software so workers won’t have to select alerts from a drop-down menu. Last weekend’s mistake occurred when the employee selected an actual missile alert from the drop-down menu instead of a missile alert drill message. One possibility would be to use icons with color codes for the different alert options, Hara said.

A Federal Communications Commission official told the hearing not all cellphones in Hawaii received the alert in part because cellphone carriers may choose not to participate in the nation’s Wireless Emergency Alert system.

FCC attorney and adviser James Wiley said some carriers may also offer the service only to some geographic areas and only to some mobile devices. Individuals may also opt out of receiving alerts.

Wiley was visiting Hawaii to investigate why the mistaken alert was sent.

On Thursday, the Hawaii state Department of Defense said it took about 10 minutes for an employee to think of sending a new alert canceling the alert.

Lt. Col. Charles Anthony said that amid the chaos, a telecommunications staffer presented his idea to create a new alert on the same platform that sent out the mistake. The agency checked with federal officials, composed and uploaded the alert to their online system and eventually issued the retraction.

The initial warning was sent at 8:07 a.m. and the correction reached cellphones at 8:45.

It is estimated that a missile would take about 20 minutes to reach Hawaii from North Korea. Officials say it would take about five minutes for the military to analyze the launch trajectory and notify the state, leaving only 12 to 15 minutes of warning time before impact.

Hawaii Island lawmakers who participated in the hearing on the false alert were Rep. Richard Creagan, Sen. Russell Ruderman, Sen. Lorraine Inouye, Rep. Richard Onishi and Rep. Nicole Lowen.

http://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/201 ... was-false/

[Karmamatterz]

just heard NORAD knew in three minutes that this was a mistake

Of course they did. The Defense Dept. has satellites that detect launch blooms in real time sending alerts.

This whole things is like a War of the Worlds tech mistake/hack coming to life. Talk about a major freakout. It truly is mind blowing to try and imagine how people felt reading that text on their phones.

All systems can be hacked, so that is a real possibility. At the same time there is a lot of crappy software out there with horrible user interfaces that are clunky and allow for easy mistakes. If you've ever used complex systems with hundreds of options you can understand how mistakes can be made. Its also not a stretch to assume it took several minutes for people to get what the hell had happened. Verify how it happened. Make multiple calls to NORAD, the governor etc...etc.... all the while these people nervous as fuck about their mistake and wondering how to handle the crisis. Add a few minutes to craft and new "all clear" message and perhaps wisely test that message before sending it out to a small select test group to ensure the messaging wasn't being compromised somewhere in other parts of the delivery system. 30-40 minutes for all that to happen is a reasonable amount of time.

Plenty of times there have been false alarms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_n ... lose_calls

9 November 1979[edit]
A computer error at NORAD headquarters led to alarm and full preparation for a nonexistent large-scale Soviet attack.[5] NORAD notified national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski that the Soviet Union had launched 250 ballistic missiles with a trajectory for the United States, stating that a decision to retaliate would need to be made by the president within 3 to 7 minutes. NORAD computers then placed the number of incoming missiles at 2,200.[15] Strategic Air Command was notified, nuclear bombers prepared for takeoff, and intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) crews were presumably placed on alert. Within six to seven minutes of the initial response, satellite and radar systems were able to confirm that the attack was a false alarm.[16][7] It was found that a training scenario was inadvertently loaded into an operational computer. Commenting on the incident, U.S. State Department adviser Marshall Shulman stated that "false alerts of this kind are not a rare occurrence. There is a complacency about handling them that disturbs me."[15] In the months following the incident there were 3 more false alarms at NORAD, 2 of them caused by faulty computer chips.[5]

In some emergency planning group meetings someone probably suggested that since so many people have cell phones lets hookup ballistic missile warnings to the alert system. Great idea. Not.

[Pele'sDaughter]

https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/23/us/hawai ... index.html

(CNN)When Hawaii pushed out a ballistic missile alert earlier this month, Gov. David Ige knew within two minutes it was a false alarm. But he couldn't hop on Twitter and tell everybody -- because he didn't know his password.

"I have to confess that I don't know my Twitter account login and passwords," Ige told reporters Monday after giving his State of the State address. "I will be putting that on my phone."

The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency issued the alert -- sent to cell phones and broadcast on the airwaves there -- at 8:07 a.m. on January 13. A state official told Ige two minutes later it was false, CNN affiliate KHNL reports. It took another 15 minutes before the state relayed that news on social media. And it took 38 minutes after the alert was sent for the emergency management agency to send out a second message telling the public it was a false alarm.

Under mounting criticism about the delays, Ige told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that while he was unable to get into his Twitter account immediately to alert the public, he did during that time make calls to his leadership team at the emergency management agency
[....]

[JackRiddler]

What was he to do? Back in 2018, before the invention of television and radio, Twitter was the only means of instantaneous mass communication accessible to Hawaiian governors.

[Pele'sDaughter]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/feds-hawaii- ... 00876.html

HONOLULU (AP) — The Hawaii state employee who mistakenly sent an alert warning of a ballistic missile attack has refused to cooperate with federal and state investigators, officials said Thursday.

Lisa Fowlkes, head of the Federal Communications Commission Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, said the agency was disappointed by the refusal.

"We hope that person will reconsider," she told members of a U.S. Senate commerce committee in Washington during a hearing on the alert that caused widespread panic and confusion.

However, Fowlkes said she was pleased with the cooperation of leaders of the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency.

Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, told the committee he was introducing legislation making it clear that the authority to issue missile alerts rests with the U.S. departments of Defense and Homeland Security, not with state and local governments.

"It is increasingly clear to me that if we get all 50 states and all the territories and 3,007 counties across the country participating in this program, the likelihood of another mistaken missile alert as a result of human or bureaucratic error is not zero," Schatz said

Spokesman Richard Rapoza said the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency has encouraged all employees to cooperate with investigations of the erroneous message. He said the worker who sent it has also refused to cooperate with the state agency's internal investigations.

"He has taken the position that he provided a written statement shortly after the incident, and doesn't need to speak to investigators because he has nothing to add," Rapoza said in an email.

The name of the worker has not been released. He continues to work at the agency but has been reassigned to a section where he doesn't have access to the warning system.

He is among people at the agency that received death threats after the false alarm.

The alert was sent to cellphones, TV and radio stations in Hawaii. The effect of the mistake was compounded when it took 38 minutes for the emergency management agency to send an alert retracting the warning.

After the incident, the agency began requiring two people to sign off on the transmission of alerts and tests. It also drafted a correction that it will be able to send immediately if a missile alert is wrongly sent in the future.

[Iamwhomiam]

So, it turns out the guy who issued the alert didn't hit the wrong button - he believed it was real. Anyway, rather than start another fake emergency warning failures thread, this week we heard this news:

False Tsunami Warning Issued Across The East Coast And Caribbean

By Emily Sullivan • Feb 6, 2018

Originally published on February 8, 2018 1:46 pm

Updated 2:38 p.m. ET

As people along the East Coast, Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean were preparing for their day around 8:30 a.m. ET, a smartphone push notification warned of a possible tsunami.

The threat, as it turned out, was nonexistent, though there is some disagreement over who is at fault for the erroneous message.

The National Weather Service tells NPR that it was a "test message" released by at least one private company as an official warning. In a statement, spokesperson Susan Buchanan said:

"The National Tsunami Warning Center of the National Weather Service issued a routine test message at approximately 8:30 am ET this morning. The test message was released by at least one private sector company as an official Tsunami Warning, resulting in widespread reports of tsunami warnings received via phones and other media across the East Coast, Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean."

The federal agency issued a tweet addressing the incident over an hour after the false warning was delivered.

The NWS would not elaborate on how widespread the warnings were but said the agency is looking into why the test message was communicated as an actual tsunami warning.

The NWS says neither the agency nor its National Tsunami Warning Center division was responsible for the false push notification, which they say was misinterpreted and issued as an official warning by "at least one" private company.

But AccuWeather, which sent out erroneous notifications, says that even though the word "test" was in the message header, NWS miscoded the message as a real warning rather than as a test.

Spokesperson Justin Roberti provided NPR with the following statement:

"This morning AccuWeather passed on a National Weather Service Tsunami Warning that was intended by the NWS to be a test but was miscoded by the NWS as a real warning. AccuWeather has the most sophisticated system for passing on NWS tsunami warnings based on a complete computer scan of the codes used by the NWS. While the words "TEST" were in the header, the actual codes read by computers used coding for real warning, indicating it was a real warning."

"The NWS is the original source of the information and displayed it as a real warning," continued Roberti. "The responsibility is on the NWS to properly and consistently code the messages, for only they know if the message is correct or not."

The error comes weeks after a false ballistic missile alert in Hawaii declaring "THIS IS NOT A DRILL" advised residents and tourists to seek immediate shelter.

The alert issued by the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency was sent at 8:07 a.m local time. It took until 8:20 a.m. for the agency to post to its Twitter and Facebook accounts that there was no missile threat to Hawaii. It took the agency a full 38 minutes after it had sent the false alert to issue a correction through the emergency alert system.

The alert was issued because emergency worker believed there really was a missile threat, according to a preliminary investigation by the Federal Communications Commission. That employee, who had "confused real-life events and drills in the past" according to the FCC, was fired.

Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

http://mainepublic.org/post/false-tsunami-warning-issued-across-east-coast-and-caribbean

[JackRiddler]

With most of these things I tend to get less skeptical over time. Not here. Regarding Hawaii, would have to bet on psyop if forced to.

[Iamwhomiam]

"Not here. Regarding Hawaii, would have to bet on psyop if forced to."

Considering our sterling relationship with N.Korea and recent developments, I believe so, Jack.

[cptmarginal]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/worl ... nning.html

WASHINGTON — A classified military exercise last week examined how American troops would mobilize and strike if ordered into a potential war on the Korean Peninsula, even as diplomatic overtures between the North and the Trump administration continue.

The war planning, known as a “tabletop exercise,” was held over several days in Hawaii. It included Gen. Mark A. Milley, the Army’s chief of staff, and Gen. Tony Thomas, the head of Special Operations Command.

They looked at a number of pitfalls that could hamper an American assault on North Korea’s well-entrenched military. Among them was the Pentagon’s limited ability to evacuate injured troops from the Korean Peninsula daily — a problem more acute if the North retaliated with chemical weapons, according to more than a half-dozen military and Defense Department officials familiar with the exercise.

Large numbers of surveillance aircraft would have to be moved from the Middle East and Africa to the Pacific to support ground troops. Planners also looked at how American forces stationed in South Korea and Japan would be involved.

Pentagon officials cautioned that the planning does not mean that a decision has been made to go to war over President Trump’s demands that North Korea rein in its nuclear ambitions.

A war with North Korea, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has said, would be “catastrophic.” He and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have argued forcefully for using diplomacy to address Pyongyang’s nuclear program.

Commanders who attended the exercise in Hawaii were told that roughly 10,000 Americans could be wounded in combat in the opening days alone. And the number of civilian casualties, the generals were told, would likely be in the thousands or even hundreds of thousands.

The potential human costs of a war were so high that, at one point during the exercise, General Milley remarked that “the brutality of this will be beyond the experience of any living soldier,” according to officials who were involved. [...]

[Pele'sDaughter]

http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/3770 ... sile-alert

HONOLULU (AP) - Efforts to find out more about what top Hawaii officials did in the immediate aftermath of January's false missile alert have been stymied at the highest levels of state government.

Hawaii law says opening the government to public scrutiny "is the only viable and reasonable method of protecting the public's interest."

But for nearly two months, Gov. David Ige's office has refused to provide information requested by The Associated Press and Hawaii News Now that could show how he and other officials handled the crisis.

Citing exemptions to open records laws, Ige's office has declined to release phone logs, text messages, instant messages and calendars related to the missile alert, even as the state moves forward with recommendations to implement a new missile alert system.

His office says it doesn't keep those records.

[elfismiles]

ALERT ALERT ALERT:

I'm vacillating tween this thread and the zombie thread as a default master thread for accidental false alarms / alerts...

Cryptic emergency alert panics Oregon city's residents
TOM JAMES, Associated Press•May 30, 2018

Supermarket shelves are stripped bare of bottled water in Salem, Ore., late Tuesday May 29, 2018, after officials warned residents that tap water was unsafe for children and the elderly due to an algae bloom. The head of Oregon's emergency management agency has apologized after a cryptic emergency alert was forced out to cellphones in and around Oregon's capital city, displaying the words "Civil Emergency" and "Prepare for Action," but carrying little other information. (AP Photo/Tom James)

SALEM, Ore. (AP) — Oregon's emergency alert systems blasted a cryptic alert to cellphones around the capital city, panicking residents by telling them simply "Civil Emergency" and "Prepare for Action" and leaving off that the threat was toxic algae at a local water supply.

Officials wanted to warn Salem-area residents Tuesday night that elevated levels of a natural toxin caused by the algae bloom had made area tap water unsafe for children and people with compromised immune systems. But that information got cut off, and a more ominous-sounding default message went out in its place, said Andrew Phelps, head of the state emergency management agency.

Officials sent a second message 31 minutes later with more information and a link to a municipal website.

Within hours of the first alert, residents stripped the aisles at one supermarket in the city's downtown center of bottled water, and a shopping cart lay tipped on its side in front of the empty shelves. Workers brought out a pallet of sparkling water, which they placed at the front of the store, and told customers they hoped they'd get more regular water in the morning.

The incident marked a high-profile glitch in authorities' use of emergency alert systems, following a false alarm sent out by Hawaii officials in January warning of an incoming ballistic missile.

In Oregon, confusion surrounded the initial alert even within the emergency management agency, with an official telling reporters the message had caught them unaware and state police asking residents via a Facebook post not to call 911 about the alert.

And when officials directed residents to the city of Salem's municipal website for more information, the site briefly crashed under the load.

"The integrated public alert warning system inadvertently defaulted to a generic message," Phelps said in a video posted on social media by the Office of Emergency Management. "I apologize for the confusion and the anxiety this incomplete message has caused."

Phelps said the message had also been broadcast via local television stations.

Cole Mahaffey, a Salem resident, set down a case of bottled water Wednesday he was carrying down the sidewalk and described the uneasy feeling of seeing the first alert arrive on his phone, with an ominous warning but no other information.

"It almost made me not want to go outside," Mahaffey said, adding that the alert caught him at the gym, and that he had interrupted his exercise routine to ask staff at the front desk if they knew what it was about. "I didn't know if there was something going on in the area, or if there was a shooter, you just had no way of knowing."

https://www.yahoo.com/news/oregon-offic ... 47145.html

Florida city sends out fake ‘zombie’ alert during power outage
By Morgan Gstalter - 05/22/18 07:17 AM EDT

The city of Lake Worth, Fla., sent out a false “zombie alert” to residents during a power outage.
...
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing- ... wer-outage

<snip>



<snip>

[JackRiddler]

Dystopian Emergency Presidential Alerts
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=41340&p=664227

[elfismiles]

Hawaii man who suffered heart attack during missile false alarm sues state
"Both plaintiffs believed this message to be true and were extremely frightened and thought they were going to die," the lawsuit says.
Nov. 28, 2018 / 8:58 AM CST
By Kalhan Rosenblatt
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ha ... rm-n941081

[JackRiddler]

But looking at this historically, it's another case of first time as tragedy, second as farce - that is, a farce that could slide into global destruction, even if it no longer meets the criteria for tragic drama as inherited from the Greeks.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb-BPI0bgqs

Also, here's a picture from 1953 you can show anyone who claims there has never been a nuclear war (at least, not since August 1945).



Atomic Tests Were a Tourist Draw in 1950s Las Vegas
LAURA BLISS AUG 8, 2014
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2014/08/ ... as/375802/

People today are such snowflakes.

.