The 38 minutes of panic felt by people in the US state of Hawaii after a false missile warning illustrates the need for safeguards in emergency messaging systems, US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai said in a speech to a coalition of first responders on Thursday.
"We want to find out exactly what happened and how to make sure that it never happens again" Pai said. “Based on the information we’ve collected so far, it appears that the incident was caused both by human error and by the state of Hawaii not having reasonable safeguards in place to prevent that human error from leading to the transmission of a false alert."
Pics of the Hawaii false alarm corrections definitely look like robots trying to fool us while they commence the process of taking over society pic.twitter.com/FmYPskduTe
— Ketan Joshi (@KetanJ0) 16 января 2018 г.
Pai also recalled a video of a parent attempting to place a child in a storm drain, adding, “It must have been searing for parents to experience that kind of fear with their children."
Emergency warning systems of all kinds need to be designed with appropriate safeguards and redundancies to make sure that a single point of failure does not produce catastrophic results, Pai warned.
Retweet if you agree we were all lucky that @realDonaldTrump was on a golf course — and nowhere near the nuclear button — when the false alarm was broadcast that a North Korean ballistic missile was headed towards Hawaii. pic.twitter.com/InkQ2C5xMM
— Jon Cooper (@joncoopertweets) 14 января 2018 г.
Hawaii is well within range of ballistic missiles developed by North Korea, which has threatened to arm rockets with nuclear warheads to attack the United States.