The chance of a decrepit NK ballistic missile being both accurate enough, and effectively nuclear armed, is very low. On top of that, knowing that just one missile is incoming, you would expect some of vast US investment in anti-missile technology to be capable of knocking it out.
It would also be NK’s last day as a livable country. It is one thing to make bellicose statements, and quite another to go through, knowing that much of your country would be turned into glass.
I’m bewildered. Some people in California weren’t warned about the mudslides, and some of them died as a result. But all it took was the push of a button to send out a false alert about a ballistic missile?
@rosered55 They were warned about mudslide. There was a mandatory evacuation order that some people didn’t heed. I am sure the gov does all kinds of stupid things but warning against the mud slide wasn’t one of them.
I’ll go out on a limb here. It was either a hack - someone hacked the system to create chaos. Or intentional to put pressure the government to do negotiate re North Korea. Don’t think we’ll ever know for sure.
Pushing the wrong button doesn’t seem plausible.
I have heard and read a variety of news about the evacuation orders. Thank you for the correction, @Iglooo.
Some people should be punished.
I agree. If pushing the wrong button was so easy, it would’ve happened before.
I am wondering what is involved to send out the missile alert, too. How can it be screwed up so easily? Have there been false alerts in the past that make natives wait for the sirens? Like tsunami warnings that didn’t pan out that make people not react immediately? Or make people go to TV/radio for confirmation?
It’s the “pushing one button” thing that I do NOT believe. Surely for something this serious, there would be a series of buttons.
Heck…I get a bunch of buttons when I’m trying to delete an email.
Come on! ONE button to send this type of alert out? I don’t believe that.
@Iglooo and @rosered55 Many of the Montecito deaths happened to people in the voluntary evacuation zone, where they were told to be “ready to leave.” We have at least one friend of a friend who died in a house that was under voluntary evacuation.
When they set the evacuation zones, they based them on the fire zones. The fire zones were mandatory above a certain road higher in the hills and voluntary below that. For the debris flow/mudslides, it was worse farther down because of the water flowing together and the accumulation of trees, buildings, cars to ram into lower structures. They consulted with state experts, but somehow did not set the mandatory evac areas based on 100 and 500 year flood plains. (And a lot of that water came from reservoirs that drained suddenly when the big water mains were sheared off where they cross creeks. Similar with fires caused when the flood sheared off gas mains.)
On topic, based on our experience, I can believe the alert in Hawai’i was a mistake not a hack. I can believe that the user interface for sending alerts is unclear and unfamiliar, though.
For the recent fires, they sent an emergency alert to all phones in the south county at about 2am that basically just said “Evacuate Now” and it took more than 40 minutes for them to send a correction that included the area that needed to evacuate, which was just a tiny corner of Santa Barbara County at the time. I only knew it was an error because I checked #ThomasFire on Twitter. DH was packing up.
For the mudslides, the word is that they were trying to send messages to just Montecito during the night and the alerts weren’t getting through. Finally they sent one at 3:52am to all of the Santa Barbara area that said “Emergency Alert: NWS Flash Flood Warning for burn areas in SB County. Take protective action to stay safe.” Too little and too late, sadly.
Our emergency alerts make our phones make alarm sounds even if the phones are muted. I was in a bar when all the phones went off at once because the evacuation areas had been expanded. It’s a scary feeling, even when you know the fire is several miles away.
Thank you, @Ynotgo. This is very helpful.
Sadly, it sounds like the system in HI was designed so that it only took one person to push the wrong button and it took a long time to send out a corrective message, since that was more than just pushing the one correct button.
It sounds like they will improve the system so that at least 2 people will have to be involved for alert to be pushed and that any needed correction can be sent out more promptly.
C’mon. Who hasn’t used the wrong email distribution list at work from time to time? (kidding. sort of.)
I can barely imagine the fear that must have gripped so many in HI. It makes me wonder if there were any heart attacks or other medical problems caused by the enormous stress.
In the event of real warning, where would people shelter? Is there some kind of plan in place? I wouldn’t think there would be a lot you could do to protect yourself from a missile.
Someone remarked that people must have had conversations with loved ones that they otherwise would not have had. Like, “I was planning to propose to you next week,” or “I haven’t told you, but I have cancer and I would have died this year anyway,” or other deathbed confessions for good or ill.
Good movie plot material here.
I didn’t hear ambulance sirens but I’m sure it caused stress for many, especially folks who made teary goodbye calls. There may have been ambulances at other points in the state as well. Of course there were many different reactions.
Our kids were offended we didn’t call them but we thought it was a false alarm and didn’t want to upset them.
I think it goes to core beliefs—I honestly don’t believe anyone really wants to start a nuclear war right now.
I’d sure love to know what hard info that button-pusher had to make the decision push? (yeah, I get it was human error, but what possessed him/her to make that error?)
I don’t get the impression that the button-pusher thought there was an incoming missile.