40 minutes??
“FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr said in a statement Saturday afternoon that the FCC would fully investigate why the initial message was sent and was left uncorrected for nearly 40 minutes, sending residents into a panic.” -The Hill
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I’m old enough to remember the night in 1959 when Mayor Daly the first ordered the air raid sirens set off to “celebrate” the Chicago White Sox winning the AL pennant. My parents roused me and my siblings from our beds and rushed us to the basement. I remember my mother and sister crying while my dad and two big brothers worked frantically to cover the windows with scraps of wood and anything else they could scrounge from his workshop. I don’t know how long we sat there in the dark waiting to die. To my 7 year old self it seemed like forever. The cold war was a shitty time to grow up. Now, thanks to our POTUS, we get to do it all over again.
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You’d like to think that sort of thing was left in the past but I remember hearing emergency fire sirens going off after a local high school sports team won a big game a few times in the late 90’s/early 2000’s
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ETA: I’m really, really glad this hasn’t ended in the Fuck Today thread. \o/
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Whenever pols mention bringing back the '50s, my first thoughts are of air raid sirens followed by duck and cover drills.
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Alternative suggestion: Legalise Cannabis, invite whole US for for smoke-in.
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As I mentioned in this thread, I did assume that it was a mistake pretty much immediately after I got the message, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been twitchy all day. This is apparently a pretty widespread reaction.
The first official statement that the alert was a mistake seems to have been in a tweet from one of our congresspeople (Tulsi Gabbard), whose office apparently had a better phone number to call than the rest of us. (The Hawaii DOD website went down almost immediately after the alert, so no information there.)
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Jeezum Crow.
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“Hawaii Governor David Ige told CNN someone ‘pushed the wrong button’ during an employee shift change, sending out the false alert about an incoming ballistic missile.”
So it is likely that when the news got to Trump, it was known that there was no threat, and that the false alarm was not caused by the military or federal government.
What do we expect Trump to have done in response to this? Launch a retaliatory false alarm against North Korea?
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People seemed upset that Trump was golfing during this event and didn’t stop. Did people really want Trump on Twitter for this? Do we really think he actually would have helped matters? I suspect he might have actually started a real nuclear exchange had he been on Twitter at the time…
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Maybe it just got slashdotted?
This might help:
https://www.jaycar.com.au/missile-switch-protective-cover/p/ST0578
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The only reason that the sovereign nation of Hawaiʻi is a target is because of the illegal occupation of Hawaiʻi by the US and its military forces. Hawaiʻi would be an outstanding place to advance the decolonization movement, and the sooner the better. Kūʻē me ke aloha! (Resist with love!)
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Someone needs to get penalized for this. A test message that shouldn’t get sent out should regardless read, “TESTTESTTEST”, “TEST MESSAGE”, etc.
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So close…
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No, it’s cool - he’s finally made a public response!
Oh… ah, nevermind.
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One should always be prepared to die.
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Earth is rigged to blow. This statement is completely true.
We needed a cancellation procedure,” Rapoza, the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency rep, told my colleague Adrienne LaFrance, who contributed reporting to this story. It does appear that the agency might have attempted to cancel the IPAWS alert five minutes after sending the erroneous one. But even if that cancellation might have ceased further delivery of messages to televisions or phones that were offline or on calls, it wouldn’t have issued a reversal.
That’s because WEA “worked the way it was supposed to,” as Rapoza put it to The Atlantic. These aren’t like text messages, where a sender can dash off a quick sorry my bad if they mistype. IPAWS notices have a specific format, which must be composed formally and in advance. Audio files for broadcast notices must be recorded or generated and uploaded. Often, this has to be done by special software on special equipment.
“Tell them that the order cannot be countermanded!”
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