SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. He sounds afraid. He had to wake his wife, Becca. Chris Luan sent her kids to a baseball tournament, a fund-raiser for school, where they'd been scheduled to volunteer. Wade has to call her, make arrangements to pick it up. This is essentially pointless: It means only that any phone that was off or out of range at 8:07 will not, from this moment on, get the warning. C'mon, please, tell me the Big Bang story.". Weren't all those cars going to clog up the streets? Three people had worked the overnight shift at the State Warning Point (SWP), which is exactly what the name suggests: the point from which warnings about bad things are sent through a statewide alert system. Mostly, though, Vern was there to answer questions, of which many were quite hostile. Lucas is working on a project about American symbols, and he's chosen the World Trade Center, which is a much different symbol from the one it was 20 years ago. There is a moment of shock, followed by controlled panic. Honolulu was quiet. He bought it after he and Daphne divorced so that Lucas would be zoned for Waikiki Elementary School. She reads the black letters in the white box, starts to read it again. There is a white box on both screens filled with black text. Updated 7:20 AM ET, Tue January 16, 2018 "We got an alert about a missile coming," she'd said. He grabs two bottles from the refrigerator, neither of them full. News Hawaii missile alert saga forces top officials to resign. So do all the other boys, more than a hundred of them. She's thinking calmly, deliberately, and, she believes, rationally. They're one flight up, sitting close to each other, Kathleen in her sensible long sleeves, staring at the door. Yet no one has called him. Chris goes to the bathroom, plugs up the tub, turns on the tap. It happened in Rockford, Washington, in September, and just the month before in a little New Mexico town called Aztec, and it happened at Sandy Hook and Columbine and all the other ones, too many to remember the names. They have to stop the alert, undo it. It's the safest place they can think of. He doesn't want to walk down 25 flights, but he doesn't want to be trapped in an elevator, either. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. Two top officials in Hawaii's Emergency Management Agency have resigned after a false missile alert sent the US state into mass hysteria. On January 13th, 2018, the residents of Hawaii picked up their phones to find a warning: a missile would be hitting the islands imminently. Fire and fury to bloody nose to whatever got tweeted overnight. Hans asked his eldest daughter if she wanted to break out the Spam she got for Christmas, Spam being an entirely appropriate gift in Hawaii. Mason went two and one, came in third. "We need everyone to file into the locker rooms," the man says. Mason Canonico checks the time, does the arithmetic in his head. He is the administrator of the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, which means people who work for him sent the alert. Then her stomach knots. On the other hand, it is possible Oahu is going to be destroyed by a nuclear warhead, even if only by accident. Some of them stand near the cage where the guy who passes out towels is eating fried rice and watching a basketball game, like it was no more or less boring than any other Saturday morning in a locker room. An emergency alert of an imminent missile threat to Hawaii was broadcast and sent to mobile phones across the state at about 8:07 a.m. on Saturday, causing panic. She's standing, wide-eyed, expectant. Kathleen's closed-toe shoes might not be sufficient to climb out, and Jeff's water, he realized, wasn't going to last until the rescuers dug them out. It was an event where most of Hawaii residents remember where they were. But it took 38 minutes for an official correction of the alert to get broadcast around the state. He was probably a very good general. "Who said that?". If this is a mistake, he doesn't want to panic his son. But the adults aren't telling them why they're moving. Her parents from New York, who watched the towers come down, her mom choking on dust that pushed up to 49th Street, are with her on the 31st floor of a high-rise downtown. Andrew knows the reason must be important, because no one is supposed to leave the gym until the weigh-in is complete. He believed her more than he believed his phone. It's Saturday morning, so traffic probably won't be too bad. Her work requires her to be calm when others are not. But lobbing a missile at Honolulu would all but guarantee Kim Jong-un's annihilation, and he has shown no recent signs of suicidal insanity. Her mother appears from around a corner, hurries her away. Not long after, there was a huge ⦠Whoops, our bad, we didnât mean it. At the end of the overnight shift, the supervisor decided to run a drill, a pretend attack, to make sure everyone knew how to react. Maybe he'll be a little more patient with his son. And it was the most terrifying experiences of my life. Then she went upstairs to the bathroom. Each has a message with black text in a white box. Wade is standing in the bathroom doorway, waiting, trying not to disrupt the routine. He doesn't appear to speak English, so Kathleen shows him her phone. Chris grew up in California, where an earthquake or a mudslide was always waiting to wreck the place, and her father always told her to gather water if anything bad was happening. And all of that happened early on a Saturday morning, when the tech people weren't at work. The emergency alert, which was sent to cellphones statewide just before 8:10 a.m., said: "BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Your California Privacy Rights. It was still warm, though, and there was no sense wasting it. His kids weren't growing up that way, and he believed they would never have to. Hawaii missile false alarm triggers shock, blame and apologies. Jeff and Kathleen are in the stairwell, near the door that leads out to the street. David Ige address the media after a mistaken alert warned residents of an imminent ballistic missile ⦠"No," one of his friends had told him. Jeff Judd rushes into the apartment, wraps Kathleen in a hug. He goes to the bedroom, grabs his iPhone. But the system isn't set up to send a second cell-phone alert saying that the first was erroneous. He also will not arrive at Daphne's until 8:54. She knows that friend, the same one who thought a lunatic was going to shoot up Waikiki on Halloween night. Top Stories. He has a vague memory of "20 minutes from launch to impact," a number he'd heard in a public-service announcement or a safety briefing or some such. All rights reserved. Gabbard was the first official to tweet out that the alarm was false, which she did at 8:24 a.m. Kathleen is figuring out more practical measures. She decides to wait on the stairs. She had her backpack open, and she was stuffing it with blankets, more than she could ever reasonably need. And if they were all going to die, she'd rather her children didn't do so screaming. Either way, he was fired in late January. Her whole family is in Hawaii. But if they were too far away and the building collapsed—they were pretty sure the building would collapse—they might get buried in the rubble. An emergency alert of an imminent missile threat to Hawaii was broadcast and sent to mobile phones across the state at about 8:07 a.m. on Saturday, causing panic. Vern hears footsteps behind him, his wife padding down the stairs. Just five days ago, in fact, Kim agreed to send athletes to the Olympics. He showed up this morning a half-pound over, had to run six laps to sweat out the last few ounces. They're still very close, Wade and Daphne, raising Lucas together yet apart. It's about a 12-minute drive from Wade's condo to Daphne's. He understands, nods, points to the boy, indicating his son had explained it to him. But the clock is ticking. Anticipated time of impact recorded. They get off on the fourth floor, decide to walk the last flights down to the parking garage at street level. I live in Hawaii! "Did you get the alert?" Nor does he hear an undulating wail from the sirens staked around Oahu, a tone his agency began testing only the month before to differentiate a missile alert from the flat squeal of a tsunami warning. She'd wait until Sunday to figure out a plan for the next emergency, decide how to keep everyone safe and together. Below that, in regular text but all in capital letters, it reads: BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. She realized she'd made a mistake, that she'd filled the tub with hot water. A hurricane is exponentially more likely to wreak havoc than a North Korean nuclear attack, unless and until Kim Jong-un becomes suicidal. He's sweaty because he sprinted all the way back. He seems nervous. Jeff stands, trots up a flight. There is a girl there, alone and weeping, holding her phone as if it were a wounded bird. A tornado warning mistakenly sent in Kansas is, for example, at worst a brief inconvenience. There's no reason a high school kid, even a bright one, should know the difference between a delivery vehicle and a warhead. "My personal view is we had 38 minutes of inconvenience.". So when he opened a drop-down menu on his computer, he deliberately clicked the line for the live alert and not the line that was nearly identical except for the word "test" in it. And when a box popped up asking him to confirm his choice, he clicked yes. He knows about PTSD. Vern was in the cafeteria of the Pearl City Highlands Elementary School on a Friday night in late January, ostensibly as part of a public-awareness campaign. There had been no threat of fire and fury, like last summer, but jabbering about a limited strike, a "bloody nose" assault, as if the nuclear-armed world was a middle-school playground. She sends the dogs out to pee. But that was a long time ago. "Putting kids in manholes is not a good idea," Vern Miyagi told a few dozen people six days after the fact. He pauses, motions toward the center of the house, the safest part, where his wife and his grandchildren should be. "See, it's a ballistic missile, not a nuclear one. The ⦠One man started vomiting on Sandy Beach, drove himself to a clinic, and promptly went into cardiac arrest. He's read the alert, but it doesn't make sense. Two of their grandchildren are in the house with them. He ran through a slide presentation, a major point of which was to keep threats in perspective. He says he did not hear "exercise, exercise, exercise" but that he did hear "this is not a drill"—language that, unsurprisingly, is not typically included in a drill. "If we're going to die, at least we're together." A red banner stretched across the top of the screen, words scrolling right to left. Six days after he told me that, he resigned. He saw an old woman with a very small dog. Turn on desktop notifications for breaking stories about interest? "Deathbed" is supposed to be a comforting word. "Everyone into the locker rooms now.". EMERGENCY ALERT is in bold letters at the top. ", Wade has never lied to his son. Some kids are already saying it was a false alarm, that they'd heard it from a family friend in military intelligence or the National Guard. Wailing sirens activated. "Hey man Daphne is trying to get a hold of you and me there's a notice we got about an incoming missile and it's on the news—maybe it with yet so all right get a hold of us…". Andrew gets up. He checked his phone. She gathers all the cash in the house, identification for her and the kids. Water, Jeff thinks, we'll need water. But at 8:07, every cell phone in the SWP begins to chirp and ping and vibrate. I love you so much. But he will not remember that Daphne told him there was no missile flying toward Honolulu. Not that the safety briefings meant much. It's making an odd sound, not the normal tuch tuch of a text. Every second is excruciating. It began with "exercise, exercise, exercise," continued through a script that sounded like a real warning, then concluded with "exercise, exercise, exercise.". She dials his number anyway. That is not completely surprising. © 2021 Condé Nast. And it is funny, in hindsight. The software is not equipped to do so. Now, Jeff checks Kathleen's phone. "There's a missile coming." She's holding her phone. But maybe it'd be better. Thank you for being my brother.". Or he might sit mute in a chair at Supercuts, pretty sure he should be terrified—the man on the radio said to move away from windows, and Supercuts has huge windows—but no one else seems worried, so he sits very still and hopes the woman with the scissors by his head has steady hands. "That's why. It's the same system used to warn of hurricanes and tsunamis and the like, and to warn of other threats in other states. He fried it up for breakfast, and between that and playing with Mom and Dad, maybe the morning would end up a happy memory. Myanmar police to protesters: Leave or face force. "Did you hear about the alert?" She seems properly terrified, and that's even worse. "Just stay together and wait.". He turned on the local CBS affiliate. He's gone for a run, down along the canal, exposed. "There is no missile threat or danger to the State of Hawaii," it reads. She's a psychologist and reflexively thought in psychological terms: If this is real, she and her family were not going to survive it, and it could be real because Donald Trump is impulsive enough to spook North Korea into lobbing a missile at Hawaii. This has never happened before. On January 13th, 2018, an emergency warning appeared on phone screens across Hawaii, alerting everyone: BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. False Alarm.". When he was a boy, there were chores on his family's little Wyoming ranch, horses and cows to look after; and when he was a sailor in the navy, he liked to sit on deck at dawn with coffee and a smoke, watch the sky blush over the ocean. Think. It turned out the alert was a mistake due to a worker's hitting the wrong button during a routine procedure. Twenty-one minutes now. No, whenever there's a drill, everyone gathers outside. I'm going to die. Lucas startles at that. He wondered, briefly, if Honolulu would look like The Day After, a television movie about a nuclear attack on a small Kansas town that 100 million people watched when it aired in 1983. The only belligerently nuclear nation is North Korea. It's not a fully coherent thought, more of an instinctual recognition, utterly confusing yet perfectly rational. Maybe he'll try to drive far away, across the mountains, and he'll call his family to say goodbye, but they won't believe him, and when they finally do, he has to spend his last moments on earth calming his parents. Published 23 January 2018. She has to call Jeff Judd, her husband. He starts toward the bedroom, stops, picks up his guitar, carries it with him, sets it against the wall just outside the bedroom door. He will remember the drive. Vern was in the military for almost four decades. He suspects he might need it later, and he wants it to be within arm's reach of the bedroom. She said she hopes “the rest of the country… leaders in Washington pay attention to … this threat of nuclear war.”. "A missile may impact on land or sea within minutes. THERE IS NO INCOMING MISSILE TO HAWAII. She believes she might die, and very soon, but her first reaction is what she's practiced. He maintains, in fact, that he believed a missile really was inbound. If North Korea did launch an ICBM toward Hawaii, the military's Pacific Command would notify the SWP, where the staff would tick through a checklist 20 steps long. There had been reports all last week that Donald Trump wanted to attack North Korea. He is referred to only as Employee 1 in a report issued by the state after an investigation into the incident. Please, don't do that.". "So I cut weight to lose one match I didn't have to lose weight for," he said. Officials scrambled to issue "false alarm" notices around the island—including on Interstate H-1 in Honolulu—in the immediate aftermath of the early-morning alert. And if they're all going to die, shouldn't they do it together? The texts loved ones sent during the Hawaii missile alert mishap. The phones aren't working. He was on a guided-missile destroyer enforcing the no-fly zone after the first Iraq war, a few dozen Tomahawks belowdecks, some of them tipped with nuclear warheads. The people in the bunker cancel the alert going to cell phones. THIS IS NOT A DRILL." I was going to leave my kids. “The fact that it took so long for them to put out that second message, to calm people, to allay their fears -- that this was a mistake,” the congresswoman said. Ad Choices, The Real Story of the Hawaiian Missile Crisis. An incoming missile alert plunged residents of Hawaii into panic on Saturday morning before it was declared a false alarm. The weigh-in is already taking too long: Some of the boys wrestling at 106 missed the skin check for ringworm, and it's slowing everything down. "Don't you believe it," Chris says. Chris is good in an emergency, methodical, practical, believes that one creates her own circumstances. I was at a friends house with a bunch of other guests. Andrew Canonico recognizes him: same guy who does the announcing at all the wrestling meets. An hour after breakfast, his daughter, the 7-year-old, was packing for a sleepover. Hans never wakes her up like that, abrupt, adamant. He's always woken early. The old woman looked at him quizzically, as if he might be a loon. Wade tells himself this must be a mistake. He's a soft-spoken man, but in a way that suggests he's confident in the few things he says rather than afraid to say the wrong thing. There is only one other reason. A surgeon put four stents in his chest after that, though, so correlation isn't necessarily causation. They have to move, get down from a fragile, collapsible high-rise, get as low as possible. Hawaii ballistic missile alert latest: Employee sent terrifying text message by 'pressing wrong button during shift change' Panic after emergency alert ⦠She did not think to retrieve the survival kit, which consists primarily of a transistor radio with possibly dead batteries in a Tupperware tub in the hall closet. Published 14 January 2018. 24/7 coverage of breaking news and live events. Lucas is brushing his teeth, a ritual he does carefully, conscientiously, with a battery-powered Spider-Man brush. Pause. He'd started running, then stopped. Wade has no idea why the earth never stops spinning, so he improvised a child's version of the Big Bang theory. There's nothing to do but wait. The old woman looked at him quizzically, as if he might be a loon. The first rule is to override instinct. A woman who ran for shelter in Hawaii after receiving an alert about an imminent missile attack has told of tears running down the faces of young children as their parents tried to reassure them. The 15-word message seems like it had been hastily written, judging by the odd capitalization and that the word "repeat" does not, in fact, precede anything being repeated in the cell-phone version. Hawaii residents went into a mass panic in January 2018 after receiving an emergency alert on their phones, televisions and radios that said, âBallistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Hawaii missile alert false alarm nr_00000000.jpg Related Article From paradise to panic: Hawaii residents and vacationers run for cover, fearing missile attack I have been talking about the seriousness of this threat posed to the people of Hawaii and this country coming from North Korea. There is not solely, or even mostly, panic. She's trained for mass-casualty events, and the first rule is to be ready to report to work. "Look, it's a missile warning, probably just a test, but Mom wants us to go over there, so, c'mon, let's get moving.". Here's How People Reacted When The False Alarm "Missile Threat" Alert Went Out In Hawaii. Getting out of the house in the morning always takes a while. Why now? Kathleen wonders if she should open the door, if the street will look different, like in one of those movies where some guy is the last man on earth. "Please," she tells Hans, "you've got to reach Wade.". She opened her eyes, confused, the phone blurry. ", Hundreds of thousands of phones get another alert. She called them into the bedroom, piled them on the bed, and played, tickling and laughing and not saying anything about a missile. No Path to Correct Mistakes HEMA used Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) , ⦠Mason's contribution was a suggestion that the state prioritize missile defense because, as he understands it, interceptor missiles from Alaska would take 15 minutes to reach Hawaii, which means the actual intercepting would happen uncomfortably close to the islands. Figuring out where to wait was an exercise in risk management. Andrew Canonico wasn't being irrational: A month and a day later, a student killed 17 people in his former high school in Florida. Fire? Single-shot Covid-19 vaccine approved in US. Traffic is horrible enough without abandoned cars littering the roads. Then her son, 14, is behind his sister, and he's holding his phone. A false emergency alert had people running for cover in a panic in Hawaii on Saturday and a KHOU 11 staff member was caught up in the chaos while on vacation. One widely circulated video, for instance, showed a man helping his child down a manhole. Jeff watches the clock. "If we survive the blast," she tells herself, "there will be fallout. But he got bumped up to 170, drew a bye in the first round, lost the second, and his opponent was injured for the third. There is a small knot of people standing around a man with a yellow phone pressed to his ear. Right? Ole Miss was a point up on Florida. It was a group project, each student studying one topic to include in a letter to Mazie Hirono, Hawaii's junior senator. "False alarm," he says. He went into the bedroom, said her name, held his phone close to her face. On Monday, Wade and Lucas will walk his project down the hill to school. The protocol sent out by the university where they both teach seemed to them to come down to don't stay in your car; get out; go into a building, or just lie down in the street. -- A Hawaii congresswoman said the false alert of a missile attack in her state shows the need to try to lessen the chance of nuclear warfare. And closed-toe shoes." Around 8:05 a.m., the Hawaii emergency employee initiated the internal test, according to a timeline released by the state. Employee 1 disputes all of that and told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that he was a scapegoat for a chaotic and badly supervised drill. There is no reason. Since 1957, GQ has inspired men to look sharper and live smarter with its unparalleled coverage of style, culture, and beyond. He will remember what song was playing on his iPod plugged into his Ford—the Black Keys, "When the Lights Go Out." He looks at her blankly. He will not be able to explain that, either, except to remark that the mind and memory can be curious things. ", Hawaiian congresswoman calls false missile alarm 'an epic failure of leadership'. The Hawaii missile alert system contained none of those features.
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