Missile scare caught hotels flat-footed

The morning of the false missile alert, some visitor industry personnel grabbed nuclear attack plans and began issuing directives that were developed last fall when Hawaii became the only state to launch siren drills in response to increasing threats from North Korea.

But others scrambled — some uncertain after initially dismissing the alert, others caught largely unprepared with no plan. “It was like an end-of-the-world movie,” said Waikiki resident Dave Moskowitz. “People were running and screaming and crying.”

While that kind of drama didn’t happen everywhere, Hawaii’s visitor industry had been working for months to prevent it from happening anywhere. On any given day, there are 240,000 tourists statewide, with some 100,000 on Oahu.

Most of the state’s largest hotel properties rolled out nuclear attack plans last fall at the recommendation of the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, said Jerry Dolak, president of the Hawaii Hotel and Visitor Industry Security Association. But Jan. 13 field reports reveal not everyone on duty knew about them or had been familiarized for quick action, Dolak said.

The varied response highlights the need to develop new best practices and emphasizes that one of the most critical dangers facing Hawaii is that the public will ignore warnings, he said.

“You have to treat a threat like the real thing until you know otherwise. You don’t have time to locate and read a plan if you’ve only got 15 minutes,” Dolak said.

Some properties didn’t know how to verify the threat or where to put guests and employees, Dolak said. Others couldn’t determine if the threat warranted use of their public address system, a decision that kept some employees in the dark because of rules preventing them from carrying cellphones on floors, he said.

Paola Rodelas, a spokeswoman for Unite Here Local 5, a labor union representing thousands of Hawaii hotel workers, said workers have indicated that “overall, it seemed no one knew what to do.”

Poor communication was a major reason that emergency response from Hawaii’s visitor industry was mixed, said Mufi Hannemann, president and CEO of the Hawaii Lodging &Tourism Association.

“Those who got the message that the alert was false were still hesitant to tell visitors. Even Hawaii Tourism Authority (HTA) was waiting for the governor’s office to take the lead after it had already determined that the threat was false,” he said.

U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said many people were unprepared and did not know what to do when they got the alert. That’s one reason why he is working on legislation that would require the Federal Emergency Management Agency to develop best practices for state and local emergency managers, he said.

“We have the infrastructure that we need. We just had a system that was half-baked and there were a series of human judgments that went wrong,” he said.

Schatz and other members of Hawaii’s congressional delegation also have asked the Federal Communications Commission, FEMA and the Department of Defense to help Hawaii and other states establish controls for emergency alert systems.

Gov. David Ige has appointed Hawaii National Guard Brig. Gen. Kenneth Hara, the state’s deputy adjutant general, to poll stakeholders on “things that worked, things that didn’t work.”

HTA President and CEO George Szigeti said Hara’s report would help the visitor industry “identify its strengths and weaknesses and guide all sectors of tourism in how they can improve their crisis response operations.”

“State agencies and decision-makers need to communicate and share best practices, and the procedures developed need to be updated regularly to reflect evolutions in technology and the way people communicate,” Szigeti said.

Hannemann said the industry will review all investigative findings, but isn’t waiting to launch additional training and drills.

“We have to go forward,” he said. “We cannot afford to make any more mistakes.”