“After he gave the State of the State address…”
When an emergency alert warning of an incoming ballistic missile was sent out in Hawaii, a lot of people thought their world was coming to an end.
It took 38 minutes for officials in the state to deliver a message clarifying that the previous alert was a false alarm.
During that terrifying window, people called their loved ones to say goodbye, parents placed their children in storm drains and one man even had a heart attack .
Then the relief came. There was no missile about to hit, and everyone could go on with their Saturday plans like usual. Expect not. People wanted answers about what happened.
Gov. David Ige said that the error was made by an employee who pushed the wrong button. It was later reported that the employee in question had not been fired, but instead reassigned to a different post.
More answers came Monday about why Ige himself was slow to respond to the false alarm. While he knew that the alert was false within the first two minutes, he reportedly forgot his Twitter password. As a result, he was not able to notify the people of Hawaii about the mistake in a shorter amount of time.
According to The Washington Post:
On Monday, after he gave the State of the State address in which he avoided the subject of the missile alert fiasco, reporters demanded an explanation for that long silence.
Ige’s answer: He couldn’t log in to Twitter.
“I have to confess that I don’t know my Twitter account log-ons and the passwords, so certainly that’s one of the changes that I’ve made,” Ige said.
Ige may want to write his password and screen name down and carry it with him, moving forward. After the alert went out, it took him 17 minutes to let the public know things were OK.
