Hawaii officials say alert of ballistic missile threat was mistake

HONOLULU — Hawaii emergency management officials said an alert sent to mobile phones and televisions warning of an incoming ballistic missile to Hawaii on Saturday was a false alarm. The emergency alert sent to cellphones said, “Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.”

Hawaii Emergency Management Agency spokesman Richard Repoza said it’s a false alarm and that the agency is trying to determine what happened. 

The incident prompted defense agencies including the Pentagon and the U.S. Pacific Command to issue the same statement, that they had “detected no ballistic missile threat to Hawaii.”

Caleb Jones / AP

The alert broadcasted on television said: “If you are outdoors, seek immediate shelter in a building. Remain indoors well away from windows. If you are driving, pull safely to the side of the road and seek shelter in a nearby building or lie on the floor. We will announce when the threat has ended.”

It took Hawaii emergency officials 38 minutes for residents to receive an alert notifying them the previous alert was a false alarm. 

Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, joined CBSN on Saturday and said the false alarm may have been caused by “human error.” Schatz said Hawaiians are happy to be safe and “everything got canceled in a very short period of time.”

“We’re taking a deep breath knowing that it was a false alarm,” Schatz said. “What I am hearing, and I don’t know for sure, is that it was human error. Regardless of whether it was human error, a glitch or a hack, whatever it was, it is totally unacceptable.”

Schatz said a local school suffered terrible anxiety from the alert. He said officials shepherd children into a locker room and had them shelter in place. “The state’s emergency management system needs to do much, much better, and there needs to be better accountability.”

Schatz urged residents to “hug your family, jump in the ocean and then on Tuesday ask your government what they’re going to do to make sure this never happens again.”

Hawaii Gov. David Ige told CNN that someone pushed the “wrong button” causing the alarm to set off. Ige said the incorrect alert, “was a mistake made during a standard procedure at the change over of a shift and an employee pushed the wrong button.”

The false alarm comes amid heightened tensions with North Korea as the rogue nation continues to test ballistic missiles. 

President Trump was briefed on the false alarm Saturday, a White House official told CBS News. The official said the alarm was “purely a state exercise.”

The false alarmed stirred panic across the island on Saturday. 

Resident Malika Dudley told KGMB she was with her husband and children when she received the alert. “That was one of the scariest moments of my life, when something like this happens, you can’t wait to find out if its a false alarm,” Dudley said.

Jamie Malapit, owner of a Honolulu hair salon, canceled appointments with his clients and closed his shop for the day. He told The Associated Press he was still in bed when he received the alert on his phone.

“I woke up and saw missile warning and thought ‘no way.’ I thought ‘No, this is not happening today,'” Malapit said. “I went from panic to semi panic and ‘Are we sure?'”