The Times In Which We Live

I spent the weekend off the grid and of course, we ran the knife edge of nuclear war. Having lived for a time on Oahu, I have a hard time believing it was an ‘accident’, especially considering the process by which EAS is actually activated. The other side of that coin is also that I’ve lived on Oahu, and the local government is every bit as competent as they appear in this SNAFU. It is what it is- but it ran dangerously close to sparking a possible nuclear war. My assessment is not far from the one contained here, with the most interesting information contained in the comments:

“False Alarm”
Firstly, it’s obvious there’s a cover-up going on. There are steps which have to take place before an alert like that one is broadcast.
I lived on Maui for twelve years, and used it as my home base for extensive travel. But it’s been too long ago to provide updated info on how the the Hawaiian emergency system works. Things have changed, but there still must be some kind of “failsafe” procedure in place. In the past, you could not just accidentally push a button and a warning would be sent out. So, unless they changed the protocol, something must really be wrong — like in the ****ed up IT department. I could see how it could be some computer screw job or even a backdoor or, perhaps, a hacked system.. Yeah, when it comes to computers, those ****ing machines make so many SNAFUS possible. I mean, just look at the ****ing mess the SCADA systems are in. And how vulnerable are the systems? It’s pretty ****ing scary.
I’ve been warning people for decades that man has never invented a weapon that wasn’t used. And modern nuclear warfare won’t be any different…..
….. The larger, more important question is: what are you and I going to do when it’s NOT really a false alarm?

 EAS, evolving from the old CONELRAD system, requires an authentication with the originating data being carried through the message each time its passed. These days you hear this information each time the EAS is used, with Specific Area Message Encoding (SAME) data being sent as a header and footer, which you hear as those annoying scrambled tones at the beginning and end of the alert. The ability for a critical warning to be sent with no verification and overriding all of the failsafes is incredibly stupid.

This whole thing stinks.

I don’t know how the infrastructure in Maui and Oahu held up, but when the 8:07 alert went out, the Big Island effectively lost internet and phones (cell and landline both). My family there couldn’t contact anyone, not even locally, after getting the alert. So those (eventual) cancellation notices via twitter and FB were useless. Not until the text went out again did they know it was a false alarm.

I just thought to ask (via social media) if the warning sirens went off, haven’t heard back yet.

No way to check if the local shelter was even open (shy of driving there) or anything else.

So they just buttoned up the house, and hunkered down. Mom’s closest neighbors, a nice Marshallese extended family (about 20 people in 800 square feet of house – with limited English) sent a boy about 12 as a runner to ask what they should do. Mom told them “gather everyone in the house like for a hurricane, and pray. If it’s real, we’ll know soon. Then you come back and we make plans”.