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Hawai’i Civil Defense Issued False Missile Warning
With North Korea’s nuclear capabilities growing and their leader boasting that he can hit any city in the United States, the State of Hawai’i was conducting a drill of their civil defense alert system and accidentally sent out a state-wide warning of an incoming ICBM.
Sirens wailed and it took 38 minutes for them to send out a message canceling the original message. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard confirmed it was a false alarm and sent out a Tweet but who’s watching Twitter when you think the world is about to end in nuclear war?
This is not the first time this has happened. Here’s the story of the first government induced nuclear panic from the Ricochet archives (March 17, 2015)
Had This Been an Actual Emergency…
During WWII, Allied bomber crews used the broadcast signals of German radio stations as a giant set of navigation beacons. After the war, the Truman Administration was afraid that the Soviets would use US radio and television stations in the same way and created the CONELRAD (Control of Electromagnetic Radiation) System. Only radio stations on 640 and 1240 AM would remain on the air, alternating in five-minute increments.
With the onset of the ICBM threat, CONELRAD was replaced by the Emergency Broadcast System. The original purpose of the EBS was to find a way for the president to address all of the United States within ten minutes. It eventually morphed into a regional alert system as well for natural disasters.
One of my first duties in television was cutting my station’s EBS audio. I was also in charge of making sure the authentication codes were up to date. In case of a national emergency declared by the president, you put the system on the air only after you matched the code word that was received in a sealed envelope.
The US Air Force ran the National Emergency Warning Center at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. Tests were run on Saturday mornings and tapes were loaded into the system that provided both audio and teletype information. On the morning of February 20, 1971 the civilian teletype operator on duty loaded the wrong tape and sent out an alert and the current authentication code: HATEFULNESS.
Welcome to Brown Trouserville.
Here’s how WOWO Fort Wayne reacted:
Even after the AP verified the mistake it still took the authorities 40 minutes to find the correct cancellation code:
In 1997, EBS was replaced with the Emergency Alert System. It not only encompasses broadcasters, but cable and satellite systems, as well as cell phone networks. It has never been used on a national basis. As former FCC Chairman Michael Powell (Colin’s son) points out, had it been activated on 9/11 viewers would have known less about what was going on had the network feeds been interrupted.
The Obama Administration ordered a nationwide test to be conducted on November 9, 2011. It had, ummm, a few problems.
Around 18% of the nation’s broadcasters reported that the test failed to trigger their system. In New York, all Comcast subscribers watched their TVs change channels to QVC. (Tune in now! Apocalyptic Savings! Limited Time!) Time-Warner customers got nothing. Viewers on DirecTV got a test slide but, instead of FEMA audio, they got thirty seconds of Lady Gaga singing “Paparazzi.” Of the stations that did have their systems triggered, many reported garbled audio.
Broadcast and system engineers have been working to correct the problems and another test is scheduled for this September. But now they have another problem: more and more Americans are streaming their entertainment from the web.
The system — as currently constructed — uses 77 radio stations as Primary Entry Points that the equipment of other broadcasters, cable and cell systems monitor. There’s presently no way to integrate that into the web. So, if you’re streaming reruns of The Walking Dead off of Netflix, don’t expect to be warned in the event of a real Zombie Apocalypse.
Incoming!
Gonna be some fireworks tonight!
Yeah, that could make for a bad morning. Wow.
When I was in the Air Force in the early 1980s, someone crossed a wire and sent out a similar warning to our air base. Everyone duly freaked out, and started planning emergency evacuations. People were loading trucks, planes were prepping for takeoff, et cetera.
One of the sergeants took me to one side and very carefully didn’t ask me to volunteer for something, while asking me to volunteer for something.
You see, we needed to have someone sitting at the launch shack, ready to pull a circuit breaker or whatever, in case a plane had issues. So they were (almost) asking the half-dozen airmen with the fastest vehicles on base to sit there until the last plane hit their afterburners, at which point they were to take a little dirt road to the north side of the base, turn right on a highway, and go – as fast as possible – to a spot on the other side of a mountain until the nukes went off.
It didn’t take too long for the whole thing to be cleared up, but it was certainly a tense hour or so…
FCC has started an investigation.
Well! Full Investigation.
A friend recently relocated to Hawaii. The above is what woke her up this am.
Son #2 is in Okinawa – I had a bad few minutes myself.
Like @bryangstephens, I am heartened and consoled there will be a full investigation. (That sound you hear is me laughing somewhat hysterically)
Here in north TEXAS the Emergency Alert System ain’t nothing but a bunch of noise about tornado warnings that We all ignore.
Again, Who is it that wants government in charge of more stuff?
@poindexter is in Hawai’i on vacation, and also received the notice.
My brother and his family moved to Hawaii in June, thus escaping the barren hell hole that is Butte, MT. Seemed like a good idea, until this morning when he was told to “prepare” for the ultimate heat wave. I told him to move back to Butte. Nobody’s going to fire a missile at the Mining City. I mean, that would be like wiping out the frozen tundra (I kid, I kid, I’m serious. I kid).
I worked at a a prime EBS radio station in the early eighties. We had a bomb shelter and everything. Funny thing. We never received the food rations, the water barrel was empty, the shelter roof was a foot above the ground, and it had a swinging door with no lock (welcome post apocalypse zombies). We’d have done better with a walkie-talkie and an umbrella.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5ndgzXRvWk
Video of Lady Gaga? The apocalypse has come!
Well, This.Is. It.
We grew up knowing that the EBS tone would be the last sound we would ever hear.
If the EBS has been hacked, what can we trust?
Nothing left.. Like a movie about the plague year I saw once, people feasting en plain air, their finest clothes, flower garlands in their hair, guzzling wine–on the brink of open graves. Half in love with easeful death.
Capitulation.
On the other hand–why be warned? We no longer believe in the underground shrines to life everyone built in the 60s, surely that comfort is one with the amulets and indulgences quaintly believed to guarantee salvation in Medieval times.
What then shall we do?
We shall die.
Well, This.Is. It.
We grew up knowing that the EBS tone would be the last sound we would ever hear.
If the EBS has been hacked, what can we trust?
Nothing left.. Like a movie about the plague year I saw once, people feasting en plain air, their finest clothes, flower garlands in their hair, guzzling wine–on the brink of open graves. Half in love with easeful death.
Capitulation.
On the other hand–why be warned? We no longer believe in the underground shrines to life everyone built in the 60s, surely that comfort is one with the amulets and indulgences quaintly believed to guarantee salvation in Medieval times.
What then shall we do?
We shall die.
by the way, irefuse to use the ‘ in the name of any state
The results of the investigation will be no hacking. That will be true whether any hacking was involved. To report otherwise is to generate a general freakout.
P>S> It will be reported through other sources that there was a hacking involved. That will also be true whether any hacking was involved. It will be too good not to report.
I don’t use the apostrophe. It’s Hawaii to me . . .
At one point the network I do the majority of my work for decided that they would honor native spellings as much as humanly possible. Hawaii would become Hawai’i. It would be San José State.
And then they found the accents did not universally translate from font to font and in some cases prevented all the interfaced computers in the truck from talking to each other. But habits die hard.
So does the Ricochet URL-maker.
Quoted from the WSJ:
It was just somebody. A government worker. It’s all OK. No further explanation is required. No action is necessary. With government workers, these things happen.
According to the WSJ, the false alarm was caused “when a state employee accidentally hit the wrong button on a computer:”
Seriously?!? When I buy a song on iTunes I get a pop-up asking me to confirm, if I try to delete a file I get one asking “are you sure?” Someone coded a button that triggers the Emergency Alert system that doesn’t even say “you are about to send this message to everyone in the state, are you sure you want to do that?”
And yet some people think the government should be in charge of entire health care system…
I was watching Saturday Morning Cartoons when the 1971 alert went out. Left an indelible impression – and it wasn’t until the Internet that I was able to confirm what I remembered.
Man, those code words were a just too on-the-nose, eh? HATEFULNESS.
Oh hey sorry never mind IMPISH k thnx by
One of my first jobs in television was being responsible for those EBS envelopes. I remember switching them out every 6 months. Always looked at the expired words, too. Wondered how they picked them? Darts and a dictionary?
You hit the wrong button and a million people are scared to death for almost an hour. Yup, that’s the government at work. Turn over your healthcare to us.
Probably close enough.
We’re saved.
Think anyone will get fired?
I don’t think it was a mistake. I think it was a test.
Now they are saying the worker who did it will be re-assigned. He will not be fired, because it was an “honest mistake”.
I remember when I was working as a Pinkerton guard and was told by my supervisor about a predecessor who was fired when he lost the keys to the manufacturing plant where we were working. It didn’t matter whether or not it was an honest mistake. Lose the keys and you’re gone.
My supervisor was a crusty, retired Army captain who was not too sure about me at first but had warmed up to me by this time. He was pointing out how easy it was for things to turn against a person.
When 9/11 happened I had thought the people in places of responsibility who had not acted on the scanty information they had about the upcoming attack should be fired. It was not exactly their fault, and it would be unfair, but they should be fired as an encouragement to the others. However, George W. Bush was not the sort of person to do that to government workers. Instead he punished the American people and gave us the Patriot Acts and FISA, which weaponized the Obama administration to undermine our system of free elections.
A test of what?
How people would react. The American people did good. No mass panic.