The state of Hawaii was momentarily put in shock today as emergency warnings told citizens to take cover from an in-bound intercontinental ballistic missile, presumably from North Korea.
Except it was a false alarm.
An employee “pushed the wrong button” during a shift at the state’s emergency management agency, Governor David Ige said on Saturday.
Jeepers. It would be kind of funny if it wasn’t so awful.
More from Newsmax:
Residents of the island state, as well as thousands of tourists, woke around 8:07 a.m. local time on Saturday to alerts lighting up their mobile phones and interrupting television programming about a “ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii” and the warning that “this is not a drill” but an “extreme alert.”
Emergency authorities reversed the warning with a second mobile alert sent 38 minutes later confirming “no missile threat or danger” and “false alarm.” The city of Honolulu, the state’s capital, confirmed “no threat” on its website several minutes earlier.
In a statement, the White House said President Donald Trump had been briefed on what it described as “the state of Hawaii’s emergency management exercise.”
“It was a false alarm based on human error,” Democratic Senator Brian Schatz said on Twitter, adding that the incident was “totally inexcusable.” Schatz said Hawaii’s residents were “terrified. There needs to be tough and quick accountability and a fixed process.”
Remember Rocket Man, our buttons are bigger than yours!
We just occasionally have an employee mess up with some of our buttons.
Never fear…we’re sure he’ll be moving from warm Hawaii to a new station in Antarctica soon.
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