Feds should issue missile alerts, says Schatz

U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz said Tuesday he introduced bipartisan legislation that would give the federal government the sole responsibility of alerting the public of a missile threat and prohibit state and local governments from doing so.

Schatz and Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) introduced the Authenticating Local Emergencies and Real Threats (ALERT) Act in the wake of the false missile alert that occurred Jan. 13 in Hawaii.

“States are laboratories of democracy,” said Schatz in a news release. “They should not be the laboratories of missile alerts. The people who know first should be the people who tell the rest of us. This legislation makes clear that the authority to send missile alerts rests with the federal government.”

Brig. Gen. Moses Kaoiwi, interim Hawaii Emergency Management Agency administrator, did not have an immediate position on the act.

“We can do the job now,” Kaoiwi said.

Kaoiwi said in Hawaii the military controls its siren warning system but not the state and county warning sirens. Right now, he said, the only way to do a mass notification is through HI-EMA or the counties.

The change could “delay notification to the public unless you develop a system to get the word out immediately.”

Regardless of whether the bill passes, Kaoiwi said, “We’ll still do our job to make sure that the public is notified.”

State Sen. Clarence Nishihara (D, Waipahu-Pearl City) said he thinks it’s too early to decide whether responsibility for the ballistic missile warning system should fall to the state or federal government. He would like to create a task force, made up of about 20 stakeholders, to examine the issue.

“Before transferring the responsibility, let’s look at it,” Nishihara said. “It should be a communitywide decision.”

State and local governments have been largely responsible for alerting the public of threats from natural disasters and severe weather, the U.S. senators said in a joint press release. But the systems they use rely upon a patchwork of technologies and procedures that are inconsistent across the government agencies that issue the alerts.

The false alarm in Hawaii highlighted some of the weaknesses in the state’s emergency alert system, which had a poorly designed user interface, without a sufficient verification system or computer redundancies to act as a safeguard from mistakes, the release said.

The Jan. 13 incident made clear the need for federal standards in the system and called into question whether a state should be responsible for issuing a missile alert, the release said.

Schatz said it’s clear it should be the federal government’s responsibility.

“When HI-EMA tells us there’s a flash flood on Maui or there’s a tsunami that may hit the west side of Kauai, that’s appropriate,” he said. “If there’s an incoming missile, we are at war, and the Department of Defense should tell us.”

Harris called the legislation “a common-sense step to ensure that accurate national security information is used to assess whether or not an emergency alert about a missile threat should be deployed.”

Gardner said, “Our national integrated public alert system is not something we can afford to get wrong. What happened in Hawaii can never happen again — people terrified by the false alert of a system that must have absolute confidence. We need to make sure we have safe and reliable protocols in place that quickly alert Americans about serious threats, whether those threats be fast-moving wildfires or actual ballistic missile launches from rogue states like North Korea.”

Star-Advertiser reporter Allison Schaefers contributed to this report.