Messages of love, anger and relief spread far and wide

“Twenty minutes of sheer terror, followed by celebratory cinnamon rolls,” read one Facebook post.

Others on social media wrote about poignant calls to loved ones to say their last goodbyes. Panic, then relief, quickly turned into anger against the state for the erroneous missile attack alert and political rants against President Donald Trump for Hawaii’s precarious situation.

The state took 38 minutes to issue a cellphone notice that the missile attack warning sent at 8:07 a.m. was false.

The prolific tweets and Facebook posts following the false alarm displayed a mix of emotions that included panic, chaos and confusion.

“On one hand, I’m relieved there is no missile threat to Hawaii,” wrote Makiki resident Kimberly Click on Twitter. “On the other, I hate that I live in a time where my family and I believed we could be facing our demise this morning.”

Memes and jokes followed, along with helpful photos of nuclear war survival kits residents have started to assemble.

One comedic Facebook post offered a job opportunity:

“Honolulu Civil Defense Alert Button Pusher: Minimum qualifications: Brain, and one finger (preferred). Will take one toe as an alternate. Task: Able to push correct button at time of alert. If wrong button pushed, tell everybody you made mistake in a timely manner, preferably right away.”

Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi, an obstetrics and gynecology doctor at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women & Children, tweeted about spending the first couple minutes following the alarm saying “I love you” to her family and then mustering up the strength, while holding back tears, to move patients to safety away from the windows.

“As I was evacuating my patients, I tried to search for where my family should seek shelter. There was no information,” she tweeted. “The whole state momentarily prepared for death because of a #WrongButton?”

Honolulu freelance writer Powell Berger, who lives in the Pacifica high-rise tower in Kakaako, imagined witnessing the horror of a nuclear bomb through her floor-to-ceiling windows.

Berger wrote online about how she and her 17-year-old daughter, Emerson, hid with about a dozen other residents in bunkerlike tunnels at the bottom of the building. She wrote about how one military neighbor, realizing there was a family with a baby on their floor, without hesitating went back up eight flights of stairs to get them less than five minutes before the supposed ballistic missile attack.

“I thought of 9/11. I looked at my daughter. I thought of that young man’s mother,” she wrote. “I went home, hands still shaking, tears still welling up. I could have died in that corridor with my daughter, watching her young life end before her magnificent, fierce voice could make its mark.”

There were other things she felt that were even more horrifying, she told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

“I texted my two (grown) boys who were on the mainland. I was so relieved that they weren’t here. I was so glad they were going to be spared.”