Isle system fails to deliver warning to all cellphones

The mobile phone showed its great power as a tool that delivered the state’s mistaken missile attack warning Saturday throughout Hawaii. But many local residents and visitors received no such alert on their devices.

These folks could be considered lucky. But the situation reveals another problem with Hawaii’s emergency notification system.

Just how many people in Hawaii didn’t receive the dire but incorrect warning on their mobile phones isn’t known. A sampling, however, suggests it was a lot.

Cade Katsuda said his iPhone SE failed to deliver the emergency alert as a stream of students ran by his dorm at the University of Hawaii at Manoa toward Bilger Hall, which once served as a fallout shelter.

“I look out my window and just see a bunch of people running,” Katsuda recalled.

Pino Pisano, a tourist from Australia, said he and his wife didn’t get the alert on their Samsung phones in Waikiki, while his sister-in-law and two others in his family on the trip with iPhones got the alert.

State officials are aware of the deficiency but aren’t sure of its cause.

Richard Rapoza, public information officer for the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, said the emergency message activated by the state goes out through a Federal Emergency Management Agency system designed to distribute the message simultaneously to all mobile phones plus local TV and radio stations in an affected vicinity, which on Saturday was statewide. So visitors from the mainland and foreign countries should receive such messages along with local residents in Hawaii.

On Monday a family visiting from France said they all got the alert on their phones. But three different groups of tourists from Japan who were here Saturday said through a translator that their phones delivered no missile alert.

Rapoza said it might be possible that canceling the alert six minutes after it was issued may have stopped the transmission to phones that had not yet received it for some reason. The cancellation was issued at 8:13 a.m. following the 8:07 a.m. alert, though it wasn’t until 8:45 a.m. that the state sent a second message saying there was no threat and that the initial alert was a false alarm.

Rapoza said Hawaii officials are investigating the message delivery failures.

Gov. David Ige said Monday that state officials have been blocked from testing the phone alerts.

In some cases phone users have turned off emergency notifications from the government. This is possible on both iPhones and phones using the Android operating system.

But Katsuda and Pisano both confirmed their notification settings are set to accept such messages.

Nathan Nilsen, a Laie resident, checked his iPhone 7 and found the alert settings activated but said he got no alert Saturday.

Whether someone received or didn’t receive Saturday’s alert didn’t seem to depend on the service carrier. Phone users with service through AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon reported receiving the alerts on some phones but not on others with the same service.

Ultimately, it was hard to stay uninformed about the missile message. Katsuda, the UH student, said he called a friend and fellow dorm resident, Kason Shiroma, whose iPhone 7 also didn’t deliver the message. However, Shiroma got a call from his mother relaying the perilous message 10 minutes after the alert, and he passed that on to Katsuda.

By the time Katsuda hurried out of his dorm building to join the rush to Bilger Hall, the state had issued its correction, though Katsuda didn’t receive that on his phone, either.