Editorial: After false alarm, systems improve

For many who were awake at 8:07 a.m. on Jan. 13, 2018, they will remember, likely for the rest of their lives, where they were at that precise moment and in the 38 minutes after. That’s the harrowing period that began with this emergency alert that landed in cellphones statewide: BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

It turned out to be a drill gone terribly awry, of course — but in the unknown of that time, the alert set off massive confusion, fear and panic in pockets across the state, with people running and speeding in cars to safety, huddling in concrete structures, even rushing down sewer manholes. Many will remember, likely for the rest of their lives, how they reacted.

What reaction matters today, though, one year after that false alert, is how Hawaii — and the nation — have improved faulty emergency systems. The range of deficiences exposed was, in a word, alarming.

Within hours of the Jan. 13 all-clear, Gov. David Ige publicly apologized for the state’s blunder and for the 38-minute delay in canceling the alert — which top officials knew to be erroneous well within 10 minutes. But for Ige to initially attempt to downplay the episode largely as an accident by one state employee at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency (HI-EMA) who “pressed the wrong button” was disingenuous and misleading. The public deserved better: a true and full accounting of the series of lapses in that HI-EMA room. Multiple safeguards that should have been in place were sorely lacking — ranging from insufficient management controls, to poor computer software design, to failure to adhere to training protocols.

Public trust in the state’s emergency agency plunged, and by month’s end, HI-EMA’s chief, another top official and the “button pusher” were all gone, and rightly so. An investigation revealed the button pusher had been a “source of concern” for a decade and had twice before confused drills with real-world events — begging the troubling question of why he had continued to occupy such a high-stakes, high-pressure post.

Ige was lucky — he ultimately dodged this fiasco politically and won re-election. But fallout from this false alert was immense, affecting emergency systems here and across the U.S. Among the steps taken:

>> At HI-EMA, procedures were immediately changed to require two people, instead of just one, to send out test alerts as well as actual ones — an overdue policy. It also implemented a cancellation command that can be triggered within seconds of an erroneous alert being sent out, which, incredibly, it lacked before.

>> The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) used the Hawaii fiasco as a learning lesson to make regulation changes that “improve the integrity, efficacy, and reliability” of the national Emergency Alert System (EAS) and minimize the potential for false alerts; that includes reconfiguring EAS hardware to reject invalid and expired alerts.

>> Effective this November, the EAS will allow more site-precise warnings to be issued, to avoid spreading panic across broader areas not in harm’s way. Under new FCC rules, alerts will be able to be pinpointed to within a tenth-mile of the target audience. Currently, alerts often go to an entire county, covering hundreds of square miles.

>> Improving the Integrated Public Alert Warning System (IPAWS), operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and used nationwide by local governments to warn citizens of emergencies, from natural disasters to child snatchings. One important new requirement: All software bought for IPAWS must allow alerts to be previewed before being issued, and cancellation of an alert after it’s sent.

A year ago, heightened tensions with North Korea helped stoke the spread of panic caused by HI-EMA’s missile-attack alert. The good news is that it turned out to be a false alarm. The better news is that it was a false alarm that spurred improvements to a range of flawed systems, starting with Hawaii’s own emergency operations.