|
The
alarm, which went uncorrected for 38 minutes after being
transmitted to mobile phones and broadcast stations, caused
widespread panic across the Pacific islands state.
The Federal Communications Commission's final report on the
incident followed disclosures that the employee who issued the
warning mistook a test drill for an actual attack.
The FCC said the primary error was the misunderstanding by the
employee who sent the alert, but it also blamed a
miscommunication between two supervisors. It added that Hawaii
authorities should not have allowed a single employee to send an
alert without requiring confirmation from a second person.
The report found that Hawaii conducted far more drills than
typical and did not have a plan to respond and correct a false
alert. It also blamed deficiencies in Hawaii's training.
The top two civilian officials of the Hawaii Emergency
Management Agency resigned in January after the incident and a
warning-system officer who admitted to mistakenly issuing the
alert was fired. Hawaii has made numerous changes in an effort
to prevent future incidents and named a new emergency management
agency administrator last month.
A Hawaii investigation in January found the system for
activating a missile alert and conducting emergency drills was
deeply flawed, lacking sufficient clarity, fail-safe controls or
even a pre-programmed way of issuing a false alarm notice to the
public.
The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency referred questions to
Lieutenant Colonel Charles Anthony, a spokesman for the Hawaii
Department of Defense, who called the FCC report "comprehensive"
and said it covered much of the same ground that the state's
reviews had found. He said Hawaii had already adopted or was in
the process of implementing all of the FCC recommendations.
FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement the
report found the alert "the result of multiple human and
operational failures. ... Fixing this should be a top priority –
from working to promote best practices to establishing a
mechanism for false alert reporting."
The FCC report recommended that all states require two employees
to approve an emergency alert and have procedures in place to
quickly address false alerts.
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Tom Brown and Peter
Cooney)
[© 2018 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2018 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Thompson Reuters is solely responsible for this content.
|
|
