Wrong button’ sends out false missile alert

State emergency management officials mistakenly issued a missile threat alert at about 8:07 a.m. today, sending Hawaii into an intense, short-lived panic before they started correcting their error about 20 minutes later.

The cell phone notification read: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT DRILL.”

Although the state emailed that the alert was a mistake at about 8:25 a.m., they did not issue a cell phone alert correction — the way many residents first learned of the bogus alert — until about 38 minutes after the initial mistake.

Gov. David Ige said at a press conference today that the false alarm was caused by human error during a shift change when an “employee pushed the wrong button.”

He said employees were going through a process to make sure the system is working when the error occurred. He added that sirens would have also sounded if it were a real attack. He said there will be an investigation to prevent a repeat of the error.

Vern Miyagi, administrator of the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, said the credibility of the system is critical to saving lives and the department will take action to prevent another error.

“This is regrettable and it won’t happen again,” Miyagi said. He said the department will look into having multiple people make operating decisions or equipment changes.

Miyagi said he also will look into why a correction wasn’t sent out right away. In addition, he said the alert should have gone out to all cellphone carriers and he will investigate why the alert wasn’t received by some cellphones.

“I can’t paint anything good on this,” Miyagi said. “It happened. We can learn from it and get better in the future.”

“USPACOM has detected no ballistic missile threat to Hawaii. Earlier message was sent in error,” a U.S. Pacific Command spokesman said in an email.

President Donald Trump was in Florida this weekend, and the White House issues a statement saying, “The President has been briefed on the state of Hawaii’s emergency management exercise. This was purely a state exercise.”

At 9:30 a.m., Ige issued a statement saying, “While I am thankful this morning’s alert was a false alarm,” he said, “the public must have confidence in our emergency alert system. I am working to get to the bottom of this so we can prevent an error of this type in the future.”