Missile alert on Hawaii Islands is a misunderstanding, clarifies US FCC

Washington: The alert that ‘North Korea has fired a missile targeting the US’s Hawaii islands, was issued due to a misunderstanding of the officer concerned’ claimed the ‘Federal Communications Commission’ (FCC) in their report. The unfortunate incident was a result of a human error and insufficient safeguards has also been noted in the report. The person responsible for issuing the alert has been dismissed and the administrator of the agency has resigned, published the US agencies.

The FCC recently published their preliminary report. The report indicts an officer with the ‘Hawaii Emergency Management Agency’ (HEMA). The concerned officer misunderstood the routine exercise and issued the alert and created panic, said the FCC in their report.

The same officer had messed up in a similar faction previously as well, claims the ‘FCC’. The report also says that the concerned officer had issued a false alert to scare a friend, in the past. The name of the concerned officer has been kept under wraps. Vern Miyagi, the administrator of HEMA has resigned, accepting the responsibility of the incident.

The international media are saying that there are ambiguities in the report published by the ‘FCC’. The officer issuing the alert has been blamed for misunderstanding the exercise. But, the message received by the officer had, ‘This is not an exercise’ mentioned in it. The mechanism is in place, on Hawaii islands, for issuing an alert in case of a ‘Ballistic Missile’ attack. While issuing this alert, it is mandatory to write ‘This is not an exercise’ in the message. It is being speculated that this particular message might have been accidentally sent to the officer which resulted in the officer issuing the alert.

Last month on 13^th January, an alert of a missile attack on the islands of Hawaii by North Korea was issued. The message was relayed to every citizen present on the Hawaii island at 8 in the morning. This created a lot of anxiety on the Hawaiian island. There was a mass panic with people running around and some even jumped into a manhole. But, the administration delayed the announcement, that the alert was not true, by 38 minutes. As a result, the Hawaiian agencies came under severe criticism from the media and the people. The Hawaiian Governor, ‘David Ige’ stated the reason for the delay as, forgot the twitter password. There is severe criticism on the explanation of Governor Ige.

There are claims of threat to the US from North Korea, who have conducted many ballistic missile tests in the last year. North Korea had issued threats of missile attacks on the Hawaiian Islands after testing the ballistic missiles. The US, Japan and South Korea had claimed that North Korea possessed the missile capability to target the Hawaiian Islands. Therefore, the threat from North Korea was considered credible. There has been criticism over the incident that the false alert issued two weeks ago, exposed the laxity in the security arrangements on the Hawaiian Islands.