It took authorities 38 minutes to get the word out that the alert was a mistake.
What would you do if you got a message on your phone saying that you and everyone around you might have just 12 minutes left?
That’s what happened at 8:07 Saturday morning, January 13, when the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency (HIEMA) sent out a statewide alert declaring that North Korea had fired nuclear missiles at Hawaii, a message that meant they could have as few as 12 minutes before disaster struck. As it happened, branch members learned 38 minutes later that the alert was a false alarm, but in the meantime . . .
Octavia Young, Bev Linczer and Yvonne Silva enjoy their women’s group.
Whit Au, a previous principal branch coordinator, was having breakfast and his wife Dorothy was still asleep when the alert came. In his mind it was an obvious false alarm. He didn’t even bother to wake Dorothy.
Harlan and Julie Klein were on their deck drinking coffee, discussing plans for the weekend, when they heard the alarm go off on their phones. Thinking it was perhaps a flash flood warning, they finished their coffee, wasting five precious minutes.
Don and Alana Busekrus’s well-stocked disaster cart.
Don and Alana Busekrus were busy organizing the day for their family. Alana was in the kitchen with their daughter Kady, home from college. “Kady’s cell pinged and she said in a serious, calm voice, ‘Mom. The missile alert. It’s headed to Hawaii.’ My first thought was, why aren’t the sirens going off? I called 911, tried to get websites and local news. Everything was overloaded. Maybe the sirens were faulty. I decided we’d better act on the alert.
Two years earlier, Alana had taken a course in disaster nursing that assigned her to make up a disaster plan for her family. “We have a disaster cart with food and supplies to last us two weeks,” she says. Once gathered, they began to pray.