Remember when everyone in Hawaii thought their lives were about to come to a tragic end?
Yeah. They made a whole bunch of excuses… but it all comes down to some guy doing his job wrong.
If you or I made that kind of mistake, we would have been canned on the spot…. but this dude’s a government employee so it took some tiiiime.
The employee who sent out a false missile alert in Hawaii earlier this month has been fired and the emergency management administrator of the state has resigned.
This follows the official report into the debacle which revealed the unidentified staff member genuinely thought Hawaii was under attack and issued it in panic.
The employee has still not been named since they sent out the phone alert at 8.07am on January 13, sparking mass panic across the state.
Remember that one dude that tried to fight us for saying people panicked? People panicked, jacka$$.
Anywhoo…
In addition, Emergency Management Administrator Vern Miyagi, who appeared alongside Hawaii Governor David Ige as they tried to calm the panicked state that day has resigned from his position.
The mistake has been under investigation by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission ever since and mystery has surrounded what exactly went wrong.
So… what DID go wrong?
On Tuesday, the Commission revealed that the employee was taking part in a Hawaii Emergency Management Agency drill and that it was the wording of that drill confused them.
When they heard the words ‘this is not a drill’ played on a speakerphone, they believed them and afterwards, they did not hear the ‘exercise, exercise, exercise’ that followed.
Because of that, the employee pressed the button and believed they had done the right thing until the alert appeared on colleagues’ phones.
JEEZ LOUISE.
That explains why the Emergency Management Administrator resigned too. This is all one huge clusterf***.
Why did the employees not know they were having a drill? Why was the messaging so confusing? Why is an EMERGENCY management employee so entirely unequipped to deal with an EMERGENCY?!
So why did it take so long to fix his mistake? Nearly 40 minutes is a LONG time to think you’re about to die in a nuclear war…
They scrambled to tell television and radio stations that the alarm was false and they corrected it on Twitter within 12 minutes but the second phone alert took 38 minutes.
It took so long for a correction to be issued because they did not have that procedure in place.
Wow. We’re dealing with some real pros here.
Among the hundreds of thousands who were given the message were celebrities including Jim Carrey and Magic Johnson.
Carrey tweeted about his panic once the second alert was sent.
Carrey’s tweet was as INSANE as you’d expect:

Ooookay then… get back on the meds, Jim.
‘Under mattresses in the bathtub with my wife, baby and in laws,’ tweeted American golfer John Peterson. ‘Please lord let this bomb threat not be real.’
At the same time as the phone alert, an emergency alert was broadcast across radio and television networks.
The TV and radio alert told viewers and listeners: ‘If you are outdoors, seek immediate shelter in a building. Remain indoors well away from windows.
‘If you are driving, pull safely to the side of the road and seek shelter.’
I would have peed myself. No joke.
Disturbing videos later emerged of parents dropping their children down storm drains to five them shelter. Those were unconfirmed.
Others however saw people running from the beaches and flocking to shelters to wait for the impact.
I’m suuuuure people are going to say it was just an “innocent mistake” and that they’re being too harsh on this dude… but NO. You don’t get to make this kind of mistake and then keep your job.
This guy has already demonstrated he has no place dealing with high-stress emergency situations, and the Emergency Management Administrator has demonstrated that he can’t “administrate” for sh*t.
So yeah. I agree with this entirely.
Do you?