Employee Who Set Off Bogus Hawaii Missile Alert Refusing to Cooperate with Investigation, FCC Says

Monica Sanchez | January 26, 2018
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False Alarm

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The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency employee responsible for sending out the bogus missile alert that resulted in nearly 40 minutes of panic across the state is refusing to cooperate with the Federal Communications Commission’s investigation into the incident, an FCC official said on Capitol Hill at a Thursday Senate hearing.

“At a hearing with the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Lisa Fowlkes, the head of the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau at the FCC, said the federal agency is pleased with the cooperation from leadership in Hawaii, but disappointed in the refusal from the key employee,” ABC News reports.

Fowlkes went on to say that "moving forward, [the FCC] will focus on ways to prevent this from happening ever again." 

The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency issued a statement Thursday saying that it shares the FCC’s disappointment in the employee's refusal to cooperate and hopes that person “will reconsider and assist in bringing these matters to a satisfactory conclusion.”

According to the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, the Jan. 13 false missile alert was triggered by an employee who “pushed the wrong button” during routine testing.

It took 13 minutes for the state to indicate it was a false alarm on social media, 17 minutes for Hawaii Gov. David Ige to tweet about the mistake because he didn’t know his own Twitter login info, and a whopping 38 minutes for the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency to broadcast a message to phones retracting the false alert.

The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency issued a statement later that day saying that the false alarm was a result of “human error” and not any real threat.  

“We understand that false alarms such as this can erode public confidence in our emergency notification systems,” the statement reads. “We understand the serious nature of the warning alert systems and the need to get this right 100% of the time.”

Gov. Ige in the statement promised to do everything he can "to immediately improve our emergency management systems, procedures and staffing" and ensure that such a false alarm never happens again.

The agency will be issuing a formal report this week on the findings of its own internal review of the incident. The FCC’s investigation is ongoing.

For more, check out the ABC News report below. 

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