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| Above, the Hawaii Capitol building from our tour bus. Photo by Armand Vaquer. |
The blame for the poor response is being placed by none other than the New York Times.
They wrote:
The false alarm about an incoming ballistic missile that sent Hawaii into a panic this weekend threatened to turn into a major embarrassment for the state and its politically endangered governor, David Y. Ige, as Hawaii officials moved to head off damage to Hawaii’s biggest industry, tourism.
The Federal Communications Commission said on Sunday that its initial investigation of the mistaken alert had concluded that Hawaii did not have “reasonable safeguards or process controls in place” in its emergency notification process. The alert was sent to cellphones across Hawaii on Saturday morning when a state employee pushed the wrong button in the midst of a shift-change safety drill. It then took 38 minutes for the agency to withdraw the alert.
The prospect of a battery of investigations by state and federal lawmakers, with public testimony about the timeline of events, suggested that the alert would probably be a dominant subject in Hawaii life for months to come.
And it quickly emerged as an issue for Mr. Ige, 60, a soft-spoken engineer and a Democrat who is up for re-election this year, and whose leadership style had already been criticized as tepid. He held a news conference five hours after the mistake to apologize, and frequently yielded the microphone to other officials.
“This is one of the worst things that could happen to an incumbent governor who has already been criticized for his lack of leadership,” said Colin Moore, director of the Public Policy Center at the University of Hawaii. “There is no more obvious test of leadership than responding to what happened yesterday.”
“This story isn’t going to go away,” Mr. Moore said. “It’s going to haunt his re-election campaign all the way to the August primary. Everyone is going to want to talk about their story — that morning when they were terrified, and why it took the governor so long to respond.”
Mr. Ige issued a statement on Sunday apologizing again for the bungled alert. “I can personally assure each and every resident and visitor that steps have already been taken by the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency to ensure that a situation of this type never happens again,” he said.
Across Hawaii on Sunday, people spoke about gathering their families for what they thought would be their last moments, until the “false alarm” announcement went out.
“Why did it take so long to correct the mistake?” said Jamie Higa, 34, a real estate agent. “Whoever is responsible clearly failed to do his job. The governor isn’t directly responsible for what happened, but he is our top elected official.”
Representative Colleen Hanabusa, who is challenging Mr. Ige in the Democratic primary in August, repeatedly questioned in an interview why it took so long for the alert to be rescinded.
“Thirty-eight minutes — and the fear and the anxiety and everything that it caused for the people and for our visitors,” she said. “This is going to have a major consequence for our visitor industry as well. Either people think we are incompetent, or we are not safe.”
“The governor and his administration did not handle this correctly,” she continued. “You cannot have people driving 100 miles an hour on the freeway and having visitors shelter in place. Immediately, what he should have done is checked and verified whether it is real or not real, and if it was not real, tell people immediately, not 38 minutes later.”
Yes, like California, Hawaii is a beautiful state, and it is also run by inept Democrats.
To read more, go here.
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