When a false emergency alert went out to the entire state of Hawaii last week warning of an inbound ballistic missile, the governor couldn’t immediately correct the error. He’d forgotten his Twitter password.
Two minutes after the alert went out at 8:10 a.m. local time on Jan 13, Hawaii Gov. David Ige knew it was false. But he didn’t (and couldn’t) tweet for 17 minutes. By then, several other officials had already beaten Ige to the punch, including Hawaii’s Emergency Management Agency as well as Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard.
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“I have to confess that I don’t know my Twitter account log-ons and the passwords,” Ige told a group of reporters on Monday, according to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
After an employee at Hawaii’s Emergency Management Agency mistakenly pressed a button during an “are you ready” drill, it took the state a full 38 minutes to get a second emergency alert — that the first had been a false alarm — out to people’s phones. That’s because before Jan. 13’s false alarm, there was no pre-written alert in the system for a false alarm.
In the meantime, people fled from major metropolitan areas, sheltered in place, and even stopped watching porn.
The Hawaii government is now taking steps to ensure this sort of thing can’t happen again. For example, there’s now a preprogrammed false-alarm alert in their system, according to the Washington Post. Gov. Ige also saved his Twitter password to his phone.
“So certainly that’s one of the changes that I’ve made. I’ve been putting that on my phone so that we can access the social media directly,” Ige said.
