Amen, HIMom. Live every day like it is your last day.
“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.”
Well, the poor people of South Korea would be taken out as well. Seoul, with a metro population of over 325 million is only 35 miles from the DMZ.
“I’m pretty sure that was the worst day at work of their lives for some of the people who were supposed to do the test and their supervisors.”
And possibly their last day at work.
I thought the warning was for a ballistic misfile. I wouldn’t have assumed it was a nuclear warhead destined to take out all of Hawaii. Something that could do damage but not devastate everything. Is that correct?
The entire population of South Korea is only 52 million?
There was an episode of Twilight Zone called “The Shelter” where all the neighbors fight over who was going into someone’s bomb shelter during an alert.
And then there’s the movie Blast from the Past…
(This was in our paper today but the link worked better from the Post.)
He’s an AP writer who lives in a high rise right up the valley (and in view of) Pearl Harbor. His reaction was to throw his child in the car and get over the ridge and to Target…food, water, big building out of the direct blast.
@sylvan8798 That was supposed to be 25 million. Not sure how the 3 got in there. Sorry for the confusion. Still a lot of South Koreans in harms way if any nuclear actions are taken on North Korea.
I have worked at one of these operations centers. The notification system is very user friendly. The one we had only needed a second confirmation before it was sent out. It doesn’t surprise me it went out so easily.y
I don’t understand why it took 30 minutes to get the second notification out. The people in the operations center should have also gotten the phone call, text and an email. this doesn’t count the operations center people getting calls from family and friends who know they work there.
It’s harder to log into my bank account.
"I suppose we can sit the worst out in our wine cellar… and then drink ourselves to death.
I think that is what Sir Richard Branson did on his private island during one of the Cat 5 hurricanes (though not to death). I imagine he does not drink plonk.
Remember “fallout shelter” signs on buildings? I though that would be so twentieth century"
My neighborhood was built in the late 1950’s and my neighbors house has a bomb shelter. You would go down in his basement and there was a 4 ft. door that went down several more steps. When I saw it i thought “this would make an excellent wine cellar”. I remember the short films about what to do in case of a nuclear attack. Somehow getting under your desk at school didn’t seem sufficient.
I’m late to this dance…I’m in HI with my dear friend and happened to be with my (adult) D who lives here now. We were getting ready to go to the farmers market when the alert came on all of our phones. We scrambled to find a “false alarm” report but came up empty handed. I immediately texted my family in Europe and let them know I was with D and that we loved them all. We stayed put in our (rented) condo and when the false alarm statement was issued (38 minutes later) we continued with our day. I personally was petrified but realized there was diddly squat I could do, and I was relieved to be with my D - I didn’t want her to be alone (without family) if it were real. Her (adult and local) roommate texted her that all the workers at their micro brewery were in a walk-in fridge. So no, locals did not know it was a false alarm. I did pick up Sunday’s Star Advertiser newspaper for the front page headline, which I will frame and display in a kitschy way. Not gonna lie, it was the scariest moment of my adult life, and I lived in Israel during war time.
This event lead to a discussion at a lunch I was at on Sunday. The question came up where would you go and what was the safest place to be during different emergencies. Events discussed were bomb attack, earthquake, flash flood and mudslide. Most agreed that if they knew a bomb was headed our way you would problably know it was the last minutes of your life. My H said in event of an earthquake he would go to outside to which I reminded him that we have big trees and the reality is that when an earthquake has happened and we are awaken we usually stay in bed till it passes. When we were kids we had earthquake and emergency drills in school and we dropped and covered our bodies under a desk. They also suggested a doorway as that is suppose to be a well supported area of a house.
For a flash flood or mudslide we weren’t sure what to do. It seems that you might be better off to stay up high inside and not open any doors.
The end result of the discussion was that most of us don’t know what to do or where it is best to go when an emergency happens.
It was never believed that it was for real. Individuals that got the warning via text message may have believed it real, but no one in charge thought it was real.
The commander of the Hawaii National Guard had confirmation from U.S. Pacific Command that the warning was a false alarm within 3 minutes of the alert going out (per CNN). So, there was a maximum of 3 minutes between the text going out and the executive branch knowing it was a false alarm. Probably less, if you assume the commander of the Hawaii National Guard was not in the room when USPACOM confirmed it was false alarm.
Any ballistic missile launched will be detected within seconds by U.S. satellites and/or other assets and the Pentagon will know immediately and the appropriate players will be in a meeting. Every potentially relevant combatant command has a 24/7 watch floor that is always staffed, along with the Pentagon and White House Situation Room (and likely others).
Also, North Korea cannot secretly launch a ballistic missile… it takes a lot of prep work and we know when they get to the point that “they can launch at any time” so if none of their missiles were in this ready state, anyone in the know would assume the alert is wrong, and then immediately make the appropriate phone calls to double check and make sure no one else was seeing something different (via satellite, etc).
I have no info on the political side of things, but it is likely that “Hawaii accidentally tells its residents that a missile is coming at them” does not warrant immediate notification of the President. And before someone tells the President that a missile is coming at the U.S. (which would definitely warrant immediate notification), they would’ve needed more than a random text message.
MODERATOR’S NOTE: I deleted several political posts. Please stay away from politics or the thread will be closed.
My roommate’s family ranch made the local news for their response:
http://khon2.com/2018/01/15/amid-panic-kualoa-ranch-took-action-to-protect-visitors-and-community/
UH graduate students react to the alert:
https://cen.acs.org/articles/96/i4/False-missile-alert-creates-confusion.html
Hawaii governor forgot the password to his twitter account. That is why the notification that the alert was in error didn’t go out for 38 minutes.
^^^ @TomSrOfBoston’s summary of the article is not quite correct. It is true that Hawaii governor forgot his Twitter password and didn’t send out a tweet for 17 minutes after the initial warning. However, the initial warning didn’t go out on Gov. Ige’s Twitter feed. The 38 minutes is the time it took the state of Hawaii to correct the initial warning on the same media that broadcast the initial warning.
Am I missing something? When North Korea launched a ballistic missile last November, Americans did not know beforehand that it was going to happen. From our point of view, it was a secret.
HI Gov said he put his username and password on his cell phone now.
Not good. He can lose his cellphone. His username and password can be used by some bad guy.