WASHINGTON — The Hawaii emergency management services worker who sent a false alert warning of an incoming ballistic missile this month had a long history of poor performance and sent the warning because he thought the state faced an actual threat, officials said on Tuesday.
The mistake, which touched off panic and confusion across Hawaii on Jan. 13, occurred when the worker misinterpreted testing instructions from a supervisor, according to the Federal Communications Commission and state officials in Hawaii.
Believing the instructions were for a real emergency, the worker, who has not been identified, sent the live alert to the cellphones of all Hawaii residents and visitors to the state.
State officials had previously described the episode as an accident. Shortly after it happened, Gov. David Ige blamed the false warning on a state employee who had “pressed the wrong button.”
The Federal Communications Commission and Hawaiian officials have both been investigating the event. The commission investigation, which is continuing, revealed a series of missteps that led to the false alert, including major gaps in Hawaii’s protocol for handling public safety alerts.
The state report was more critical of the employee, who it said had been fired. The investigation found that he had been a “source of concern” for 10 years and had twice before confused drills with real-world events.
In a related development, Vern T. Miyagi, the administrator of the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, resigned on Tuesday.
Beginning at 8:05 a.m. on Jan 13, the reports say, a midnight supervisor at the agency began an unplanned drill during a shift change. The supervisor pretended to be from the United States Pacific Command in a phone call placed to day-shift workers.
In the call, the supervisor said, “Exercise, exercise, exercise,” as required when tests are conducted. According to the Federal Communications Commission, the supervisor also erroneously said, “This is not a drill.”
According to Bruce Oliveira, the retired Army general who led the state investigation, the message spoken by the shift leader did not adhere to the script outlined in the protocol. “What was actually said in the script was taken from an actual notification,” he said.
But the general emphasized that the shift leader had some “flexibility” and did say “exercise, exercise, exercise” before and after his message. That “tells everybody that this is a practice drill,” General Oliveira said.
Although other emergency management officials in Hawaii understood that the state was conducting a drill at the time, the employee who sent the alert said in a written statement that he had believed there was a real emergency.
The employee then chose from options in a drop-down menu that included test and real alerts. When prompted with the question “Are you sure you want to send this alert?” the employee clicked “yes,” according to the commission.
Panic set in across Hawaii almost immediately, with people furiously contacting members of their family and seeking shelter. The escalating tensions between the United States and North Korea added to the level of concern.
When the employee was directed to cancel the alert to prevent it from going to any phones that had not yet received it, he “just sat there and didn’t respond,” the state report said.
It took about 38 minutes to send a second alert that said the original one was an error. In its report, the Federal Communications Commission faulted Hawaii’s emergency agency for lacking measures to prevent the mistake and to quickly notify the public to disregard it.
Hawaii “didn’t have reasonable safeguards in place,” Ajit Pai, the commission chairman, said.
Michael O’Rielly, a Republican commissioner, said: “It is astounding that no one was hurt.”
The mistake in Hawaii has stoked calls by lawmakers and regulators to improve wireless emergency alerts, which are slowly being updated and will include longer messages and Spanish-language versions starting next year.
The false alarm also exposed some vulnerabilities in the military’s Pacific Command headquarters in Hawaii. On the morning of the alert, the command’s operations center did not have immediate access to the state’s unclassified alert system. Mobile devices are not allowed in the command headquarters for security reasons.
The center did not realize what was happening until military staff frantically called in from outside. Cmdr. Dave Benham, a spokesman for the Pacific Command, said that process had taken only seconds. The command sent out its own message correcting the false alarm.
Commander Benham declined to say what corrective measures the command had taken. Without going into detail, he said the Pacific Command was “using lessons from this event as an opportunity to improve our internal processes as well as coordination with state authorities.”
Started in 2012, the Wireless Emergency Alert system grew from the decades-old Emergency Broadcast System used for television and radio alerts. The federal government viewed mobile phone technology as a more efficient and reliable way of warning individuals about weather and law enforcement threats and sharing missing-person alerts.
The program is voluntary, and every major wireless carrier and hundreds of cities, counties, states and law enforcement offices participate. Consumers do not pay to get alerts and can opt out of receiving the textlike warnings, except for those sent by the president.
The episode in Hawaii also revealed major differences in how alerts are sent. In places like Houston, Chicago and New York City, tests and real alerts are not kept in the same drop-down menu, and at least one other person’s approval is required to send an alert, according to public safety experts.
The report recommends, among many suggestions, that Hawaii put into effect a two-person confirmation process, in which all directives and actions are read aloud and verified by two employees. It also recommends adding an additional level of approval before a real alert is issued, such as, “Are you sure you want to send a ‘Real World Ballistic Missile Alert’?”
A computer process to rapidly issue alert cancellations has already been installed.
Some lawmakers have proposed that only members of the Department of Defense or Department of Homeland Security should be able to send a warning about missile threats.
On Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission voted to improve one aspect of the emergency alert system, allowing public safety officials to send more geographically precise alerts to avoid spreading panic across broad swaths of the public.
Under the new rules, alerts can be directed to areas within a tenth of a mile of the target audience. Under the existing system, alerts often go to an entire county, spanning hundreds of square miles.
The new technical requirement, which is to take effect in November 2019, is seen as a major upgrade by public safety officials. They say they have been put in the difficult position of deciding to send alerts for fires, hurricanes and other emergencies, while balancing concerns of raising fears among people who are not immediately in harm’s way.
“When disaster strikes, it’s essential that Americans in harm’s way get reliable information so that they can stay safe and protect their loved ones,” Mr. Pai said. “People shouldn’t miss out on potentially lifesaving information just because the alert system’s current brush stroke is too broad.”
Correction: January 30, 2018
An earlier version misstated, in one instance, the circumstances under which a state worker in Hawaii sent a false emergency alert about an incoming ballistic missile. As the article correctly noted elsewhere, the worker sent the alert intentionally, not inadvertently, after misunderstanding a supervisor’s directions.
Correction: January 30, 2018
An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a Republican member of the Federal Communications Commission. He is Michael O’Rielly, not O’Reilly.
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