Hawaii's Emergency Agency Spent Months Preparing to Warn of an Incoming Ballistic Missile. It Had No Procedure for Saying There Wasn't One.
At 8:07 a.m. on Saturday 13 January 2018, the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency sent the following message to phones, radios and televisions across the state: "BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL." There was no missile. The Federal Communications Commission's final report on the incident opens by noting that the phrase had been used in Hawaii once before, on 7 December 1941, when a naval officer sent "AIR RAID ON PEARL HARBOR X THIS IS NOT DRILL." The phrase, the report observes, "has regrettable resonance in Hawaii."
What followed, in the report's words, was "38 minutes of confusion, fear and uncertainty" for a state of more than 1.4 million residents and roughly 200,000 visitors on an average day. Some people noticed that the air-raid sirens had not gone off and checked social media. Others did not. The board of the National Association of the Deaf, which happened to be meeting in Honolulu, followed the instruction to seek shelter, moved into a windowless storage room in a school library, and stayed there for twenty minutes with no access to radio or television.
The Drill
The agency had been rehearsing this exact message for months. In May 2017, because of the nuclear threat from North Korea, it began converting a training protocol for falling satellite debris into a ballistic missile drill. By late November it was running the drill on a "no-notice" basis, so that warning officers would not know it was coming. Between 28 November 2017 and 13 January 2018 it ran the drill 18 times, six of them in the eight days before the false alert. Other emergency agencies told FCC investigators that they drill weekly, at most.
On the morning in question, the midnight shift supervisor decided to run it at the 8 a.m. shift change, reasoning that a call from Pacific Command announcing an incoming missile would be hardest to handle then. Drilling at shift change was not standard procedure. The day shift supervisor understood that a drill was planned, but not that it would involve his officers, and so was not in the room. The supervisor played a recording over a secure phone line. According to the FCC, it opened with "exercise, exercise, exercise," then said "this is not a drill," then closed with "exercise, exercise, exercise." The phrase in the middle came from the script for a real attack. In the supervisor's analysis, the FCC reported, the deviation was "not material," because the word "exercise" made clear it was a drill.
The Menu
Every other officer in the room understood that this was a drill. The officer at the alert terminal did not. He said afterwards that he had not heard "exercise" at all, but had heard "This is not a drill." He selected the template for a live alert from a drop-down menu that, per the FCC, listed an internal "Test missile alert" together with the live "Missile alert" on the same screen, behind the same log-in. The software then asked: "Are you sure that you want to send this Alert?" It asked that whether the message was a test or real, and it did not show him the text he was about to send. Until that morning, no second person had to confirm a ballistic missile alert.
At 8:08 a.m. the alert arrived on his own phone. The agency's internal investigation, by retired Brigadier General Bruce Oliveira, records that when a colleague told him to send the cancellation, he "just sat there and didn't respond." Another officer "took control of Employee 1's mouse" and sent it. The cancellation went out at 8:12. It stopped the message from being retransmitted. It did not tell anyone that the message had been false.
Two days later the governor's office released an image of the menu, which the agency's administrator had texted to the governor's spokeswoman. Honolulu Civil Beat then reported that the image was not real; it showed more options than the officer had actually had. The agency said it could not release the real screen, because doing so would leave the system vulnerable to hackers, and supplied a "more accurate" mock-up instead. The mock-up included a new "false alarm" option, added after the false alarm.
The Correction
The ballistic missile checklist had 20 steps. None of them covered what to do if the alert turned out to be a mistake. The agency's own report found that its Preparedness Branch had already identified the need for a "Deactivation" section or an "All Clear" message, and concluded that had the protocol been written within the previous two months, "the delay in sending out an official notification over WEA/EAS that the alert was false would not have happened." The FCC put it more simply. The agency "had not anticipated the possibility of issuing a false alert."
So it improvised. At 8:20 a.m. it posted "NO missile threat to Hawaii" on Twitter. At 8:27 staff met to decide which event code a correction should use, and chose the Civil Emergency Message. At 8:30 they phoned FEMA to check. The first call went unanswered. The second reached an official on a mobile phone, and they agreed within 45 seconds. The agency's own report says it "mistakenly believed that it had to consult with FEMA," and that this contributed to the 38 minutes. The FCC report says that the agency knew at the time it did not need FEMA's authorisation and was only seeking confirmation. From 8:31 to 8:44 a deputy branch chief logged in and composed the correction messages. In the rush, the deputy chief did not click to preview and save the text-to-speech audio, so the broadcast version went out silent. It was sent at 8:45 a.m. Every vendor the FCC interviewed, including Hawaii's, offered a one-click cancel button. Cancelling had taken five minutes. Explaining took another 33.
The Password
At 8:09 a.m., two minutes after the alert, Major General Joe Logan, the state adjutant general, told Governor David Ige that it was false. The governor's account passed on the agency's notice at 8:24. Asked about the gap, Ige told reporters: "I have to confess that I don't know my Twitter account log-ons and the passwords, so certainly that's one of the changes that I've made." His staff said he would in future be able to log in himself during emergencies.
The Personnel File
The internal report noted that the officer at the terminal had been "a source of concern for the same SWP staff for over 10 years," that colleagues were "not comfortable with Employee 1 as a supervisor, two-man team, or as a part of the SWP in general," and that he had "confused real life events and drills on at least two separate occasions." He was fired on 26 January. He declined to be interviewed by the FCC, but he spoke to NBC News anonymously and said he had been "100 percent sure" the attack was real. An FCC attorney said the commission was "not in a position to fully evaluate the credibility" of that. The agency's administrator, Vern Miyagi, resigned on 30 January. Its executive officer, Toby Clairmont, resigned as well, and another employee was suspended without pay. Alerts now need two people.
For months, the agency had rehearsed every step of telling 1.4 million people a missile was coming, and had written no procedure for saying it wasn't. The one employee who believed the drill was real was the one at the terminal. The governor knew the truth at 8:09 and did not have the password.
Filed from public reporting:
- Federal Communications Commission, Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau — "Report and Recommendations: Hawaii Emergency Management Agency January 13, 2018 False Alert"
- State of Hawaii Department of Defense — "False Ballistic Missile Alert Incident Investigation for January 13, 2018 – Findings and Recommendations"
- Honolulu Civil Beat — "Hawaii Distributed Phony Image Of Missile Warning Screen"
- NBC News — "Hawaii Gov. David Ige slow to correct false missile alert because he couldn't log onto Twitter"
- NPR via HPPR — "Worker Who Sent Hawaii False Alert Thought Missile Attack Was Imminent"
- CBS Philadelphia / Associated Press — "Hawaii Man Says He Was '100 Percent Sure' About Sending Missile Alert"
- Fox News / Associated Press — "Officials fire worker who sent Hawaii missile false alarm"
