The alert, issued by the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency on Jan. 13, warned of an inbound missile and wasn’t corrected until 38 minutes later. It happened because a staffer had simply clicked on a wrong link.
“Could it happen here?” was a common refrain after the blunder, and the most common response was that human error does happen, but protocols and redundancies are in place to mitigate that.
In Massachusetts, the procedures and protocols have enough built-in redundancy to virtually guarantee that it wouldn’t happen there. The Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency has a platform for a live alert and another platform for tests. To send out a test alert, the live platform would first have to be turned off, then the test would go out and would be labeled as such.
Further, the test couldn’t go out until three people — two managers and a dispatcher — signed off on it. For a live message, again, three people would have to sign off on it.
“Our platforms are different and when we do tests we have a pre-scripted message that says ‘test, test, test, this is a drill,’” said Kurt Schwartz, emergency management director. Sending out a live message can be authorized only by Schwartz, his deputy or the chief of response and field services, and all three must be either on a conference call or in a room at the time.
“The only way I can see doing anything like what happened in Hawaii would be intentional misconduct by someone who has access to the system and intends to do it and that’s a very hard thing to prevent,” said Schwartz, “although our dispatch center is always staffed by a minimum of two people, so one person attempting misconduct would be immediately detected by the second person.”
Schwartz said he and his staff met to review protocols after the Hawaii incident and feel confident that no changes are necessary.
In an email, Cory Grogan, a spokesperson from the Oregon Office of Emergency Management, wrote, “We will be reviewing Oregon Emergency Response System protocols for sending messages with built-in authorities for certain types of messages and issuing corrections in the unlikely event that it is needed.”
Grogan added that there is always the risk of human error, but thousands of these test messages are sent annually without issue.
Karina Shagren, communications director for the Washington [state] Military Department, said in an email that what happened in Hawaii is a teachable moment. “We look forward to reviewing and analyzing the lessons learned to see if there are any changes that we should implement to strengthen our own alert system. At the same time, we’re working with our federal partners to review processes, develop possible improvements, etc.”
Jim Judge, the Volusia County, Fla., emergency management director, knows first-hand about false alerts. While in a conference call after Hurricane Irma, Judge kept getting alerts over his phone. At first, he thought it was an Amber Alert but soon realized it was a notice advising residents to boil their water before using it. The message was a mistake.
“The city managers were yelling at me and I didn’t know anything about it,” he said. The mistake came from the state, which finally corrected the error, but damage control had to be done. “We had to go to the media, we were already in recovery mode [from the hurricane] and going in a hundred different directions. It really threw a wrench into what we were doing.”
The mistake turned out costly only in that it took a while to calm down the county residents, but there could be a price paid for such mistakes.
After the earthquake in Alaska Tuesday, Judge said he was curious to see if people along the West Coast would heed a tsunami alert after the false alarm in Hawaii.
“In all honesty, if I was in Alaska or down the West Coast and the tsunami warning came out, I would have to pause and say, ‘Is this real, do I need to take cover, or is this another mistake?’ That’s the first thing I thought of, I hope somebody didn’t push another wrong button.”
