Whoops...

[Lord Jim]

Not the best news to wake up to:

'This is not a drill: Hawaii residents wake up to false alarm of imminent missile attack



Hawaii residents woke up to emergency alerts on their phones today about an imminent ballistic missile attack which they later learned was a false alarm.

The emergency alert was sent to people's mobile phones in Hawaii at about 8:08 a.m. local time with the startling words, "BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL."

A spokesman for the U.S. Pacific Command, Dave Benham, told ABC News in a statement that no ballistic missile threat to Hawaii was detected.

"Earlier message was sent in error. State of Hawaii will send out a correction message as soon as possible," Benham said.

When asked for comment on the emergency alert, a spokesperson for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) said in a statement to ABC News, “We see absolutely nothing from NORAD in terms of a missile warning and refer you to the state of Hawaii”


Messages correcting false emergency alert in Hawaii were broadcast on TV as well as sent to cellphones

Diane Cluxton, who lives on the Big Island, said she was grocery shopping with her husband when she received the false alert this morning.

"My husband got it at the same time and then all of a sudden you heard all these "What?" throughout the store, because everybody was receiving it all at the same time," Cluxton told ABC News. "One person actually sought shelter in a doorway waiting for some other notification, so it definitely looked like everybody received the alert."

Cluxton said some people in the store eventually received a second alert on their phone saying it was a false alarm.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/drill-hawaii-r ... d=52328642

[rubato]

How to train people to ignore warnings. Step one, cry wolf.


yrs,
rubato

[Lord Jim]

‘Wrong button’ pushed during ‘shift change’ blamed for false Hawaii missile alert

HAWAII – An emergency alert notification sent out on Saturday claiming a “ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii” was a false alarm caused by an employee pressing the “wrong button” during a shift change, according to Hawaii Gov. David Ige.

“BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL,” the initial emergency alert read.

While the message caused concern on social media, the Hawaii Office of Emergency Management quickly responded on Twitter, saying, “NO missile threat to Hawaii.”

“It was a mistake made during a standard procedure at the change over of a shift and an employee pushed the wrong button,” Gov. David Ige told CNN.

http://fox8.com/2018/01/13/wrong-button ... ile-alert/

Okay, I'm confused...

What "button" do they have that could be "accidentally pushed" that would only send out text messages to phones without also sending it through the rest of the EBS system? (like the television stations, highway signs, etc.)

If there really were an incoming ICBM, under what scenario would you want an alert option that only targeted phone text messages?

[BoSoxGal]

Could they be covering up a hacking?

I can’t begin to imagine the terror some people experienced.

[Burning Petard]

The false message DID go out to phones, hiway signs, civilian radio, tv announcements. I really wonder what the response to all this was from the many military installations in that tiny state.

snailgate

[Joe Guy]

Trump Tweet

A missile has been launched at Hawaii. Fat Little Rocket Man has finally crossed the line. The button I just pushed will make him sorry he did it, I can tell you that. Unbelievable!

[Econoline]

It's probably a good thing he never learned that Hawaii is part of the U.S.

[Joe Guy]

That's why Trump believes Obama isn't a US citizen.

[RayThom]

[Lord Jim]

The false message DID go out to phones, hiway signs, civilian radio, tv announcements.

That became clear at the very thorough press conference that the governor and emergency director held later in the day. But prior to that the media did a extremely poor job of reporting this; all the coverage I saw on all three cable news networks or read (like the article I quoted in the OP) only referred to the text messages.

[Bicycle Bill]

That's why Trump believes Obama isn't a US citizen.

Neither does Sheriff Joe.

• Arizona Senate candidate Joe Arpaio, the controversial former sheriff of Maricopa County and an outspoken "birther," said Saturday he is not surprised that Hawaiians received an erroneous emergency mobile alert about an imminent ballistic missile attack because "there's something wrong with that government."
  
  Case in point, according to Arpaio?  Former President Barack Obama's "fraudulent" Hawaii birth certificate.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/arpaio-s ... d=52338056

-"BB"-

[Big RR]

Back to the OP, if you think of it, what kind of shelter could you go to on an island the size of Oahu if attacked with nuclear weapons (and even if you could survive the initial attack, would you want to be on a little piece of land contaminated by fallout and about 2500 miles from the mainland (or what's left of it).

[Burning Petard]

Big RR, that is the other half of this story. This state government agency had a plan and a process for sending the message, but NOTHING about the action such a message was expected to prompt.

snailgate.

[Big RR]

Well that's pretty much civil defense in a nutshell, at least as it applies to a nuclear attack. These Hawaiians were ready to Duck--QUACK--and cover. We really haven't come very far from hiding under our school desks to escape the nuclear blast. But we get shiny bells and whistles for warning systems to look like we're doing something. The same thing applies to airport security screening which does nothing but create lines.

ETA: When I was pretty young, but old enough to realize most of what was happening, NYC (or at least Brooklyn) held an air raid drill right in the middle of the Cuban Missile crisis. what happened was like an episode from twilight zone--I saw some people screaming in the streets, a few grown men crying (and that made a big impression on my because I never saw a man crying before), and people who were near home (my mom and I weren't) locking and barricading their doors--my mom and I tried to get in a candy store, but the guy locked the door and pulled his shades while people were knocking outside--I recall huddling in a doorway (maybe of the candy store--it's too long ago to know for sure) until the all-clear was sounded.

the other thing I recall were the drills in school--the most common was the teacher yelling "take cover" and we'd hide under our desks; the second had a special alarm in the school (not the fire drill bell) and when it sounded we woud immediately go to the coat room, take our coats, and got into the hall where we huddled against he wall and threw our coats over our heads; the third was less common (and may have taken place of the coat drill)--we would go into the halls and the girls would sit tight against the wall while the boys would stand over them, with their hands against the wall, shielding them with their bodies (I guess we were protecting the "seed crop"--we'd need a lot more women to repopulate, the bys were expendable ). The sad part is, all these things were part of government programs, and we didn't have anyone near approaching the insanity of Trump in the White House.

[Lord Jim]

Back to the OP, if you think of it, what kind of shelter could you go to on an island the size of Oahu if attacked with nuclear weapons (and even if you could survive the initial attack, would you want to be on a little piece of land contaminated by fallout and about 2500 miles from the mainland (or what's left of it).

That seems to envision a Cold War style massive nuclear exchange with the Russians or the Chinese scenario, which seems pretty remote...

A far more likely scenario, ("likely" being a relative concept here) would be if the second craziest national leader on the planet were for some deranged reason to decide to lob a single ICBM at an American state, and picked Hawaii because it was the easiest one for him to reach...

Under this scenario, there wouldn't be much you could do if you happened to be at ground zero, but short of that presumably there would be some things you could do to help protect yourself against radiation poisoning, etc...

Depending on your distance from the detonation and the size and yield of the weapon...

[Big RR]

Well clearly it could depend on the size of the warhead (or more likely warheads); remember Oahu is less than 100 miles at its longest dimension and only around 600 square miles in area. As I recall, even a 10 megaton blast could pretty much take most of that out--a couple of similar warheads would be far more efficient. And then you'd be on an island contaminated with fallout and thousands of miles from help. Not sure what you could do to help survival when all your drinking water is contaminated, as well as most food. And absent transportation, there's no real place you can go. It's quite different from being, say, in Kansas city where you can walk for hundreds of miles to flee the fallout. When you see the damage a hurricane can wreak on a small island (Puerto Rico or St Thomas, e.g.), and the time to response for even contiguous areas (like during Katrina), I wouldn't hold a lot of hope in any help coming quickly, even from the other local islands.

Now I would agree that detonation of a small atomic device or dirty bomb by a terrorist organization would not be as widespread, but not a missile attack with multiple warheads and airbursts.

[rubato]

I haven't seen any evidence that the Un-dictator can hit a target as small as one of the Hawaiian islands.

yrs,
rubato

[RayThom]

[Econoline]

My sister-in-law lives on the island of Hawai‘i ("the Big Island"); she received that message and spent a half an hour in stunned confusion. (A big part of the confusion came from the fact that she's a Red Cross volunteer and this is not something they'd ever trained for.)

Personally, if I happened to be on the Big Island when this happened I think I'd head for the east side of the island, behind the mountains (volcanoes), and/or find the nearest lava tube.

[BoSoxGal]

That’s a stupid list; seems to me you’d want to pour a great big glass of scotch - or other libation of choice - light up a big fat stogie or blunt, crank up your favorite music and then sit back with a lovely window view to watch the end of your world.