Eng-Tips is the largest engineering community on the Internet

Intelligent Work Forums for Engineering Professionals

  • Congratulations waross on being selected by the Eng-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Oops, pushed the wrong button 10

Status
Not open for further replies.

Sparweb

Aerospace
May 21, 2003
5,105
CA
No injuries know during the panic, but it could have been much worse:
14xp-hawaii-sub2-master768-v3.jpg


STF
 
Replies continue below

Recommended for you

We should encourage The Prez to golf even more than he already does.


Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
 
And THAT is something that the Trump Administration can take full credit for, just like it took credit for all the positive things that happened last year.

[rofl]

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
I found it ironic that the news article about the mistake was itself followed with two corrections.

Bill
--------------------
"Why not the best?"
Jimmy Carter
 
Within a few minutes of this notice going out, but well before the mistake was publicly acknowledged, the White House released a statement saying that it was actually an exercise.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without
 
Lots of panic on Saturday morning for me. I was working at an Oahu quarry when the alert came in. We all rushed to an old out-of-service aggregate crusher - 4 foot thick concrete walls, and roof.

It is interesting - at the quarry I NEVER get cell/mobile reception and my phone stated "No Service" on Saturday, however I did receive the alert, and eventually the cancellation of the alert too. Can anyone explain why that is/was?
 
itsmoked said:
Texts use a very low fidelity and separate comm channel that is far more robust than the phone or data channels.

Makes sense. Thanks, itsmoked.
 
It was NOT the Trump administration!

It WAS a single Hawaiian (deliberately left unnamed and hidden!) bureaucrat deliberately pushing the "override" ("Are you sure you want to send this message?) second-check control on the program controller. After 40 years of "no public drills" policy at all! (In fact, at least one group (a NW city) deliberately wrote a law saying they would NOT comply with any public nuclear drill at all. ) Is it NOT rather to the credit of the trump administration that the drill was being run at all? That the drill was run when the stock markets were closed, and that the drill DID make the previous three administration actually responsible for those nuclear warheads being built, being armed, and being installed on workable missiles with workable staging technology and working re-entry thermal shields becoming a credible threat to the US soil?

Now, how is it possible to blame the blame the President for a Washington-level decision to run a drill for the actual deliberate and specific error of a civil defense bureaucrat in a different state? Ultimate accountability? Certainly. But specific accountability?
 
Thank you racookpe1978.

It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.
 
Typical civil servant... he wasn't fired for incompetence, he was re-assigned...
 
Explsnstion of error:

A false alarm warning Hawaiians of an incoming ballistic missile on Saturday, was reportedly issued because of a “terribly designed” user interface.

The computer system that allows the Hawaiian Emergency Management Agency (HEMA) to send emergency alerts asks employees to select the type of alert that they are sending from a drop-down menu.

Among the options available are two for missile alerts, according to the Washington Post. One is labelled “test missile alert”, which will test the notification system is working without actually sending an alert to the public.

The other is labelled “missile alert”. Selecting that option will send an alert to every mobile phone in Hawaii, warning recipients to “seek immediate shelter” – and specifically noting that “this is not a drill”. That was the option the HEMA employee mistakenly selected.

It was, in fact, a drill. The one-word difference between the two menu options was easily overlooked, and there is only one other difference in the system between the test alert and the real thing: a confirmation prompt, which the employee also clicked through.

“This sounds like terrible user interface design to me,” said computer security expert Graham Cluley. “Why have the genuine ‘Jeez Louise! Freak out everybody!’ option slap-bang next to one the harmless ‘Test the brown alert’ option?

“Even though the menu option still required confirmation that the user really wanted to send an alert, that wasn’t enough, on this occasion, to prevent the worker from robotically clicking onwards.”

In the days since the alert, HEMA has made a number of tweaks to the computer system to prevent a repeat of the error. It has added a “cancellation button”, allowing users to send a second alert over the same system that notifies recipients that the first was a false alarm. On Saturday, sending that second “false alarm” alert required extraordinary permission, delaying it for 38 minutes.

HEMA has also added a requirement for a second person to confirm the message to be sent, hopefully preventing the first from simply clicking through mistakenly.

“It was too easy — for anyone — to make such a big mistake,” HEMA spokesman Richard Rapoza told the Post.
 
The flight time to Hawaii for an ICBM launched from Asia would be less than 10 minutes (from China, Pakistan, NK for example). The flight time to Hawaii for an ICBM launched from a submarine may be as short as 1-2 minutes. One would have to conclude that the use of an early warning system would be somewhat worthless for an incoming H bomb.

This incident is a good example of the need to eliminate nuclear weapons because of the risk of a accidental use.
 
I've got friends visiting Hawaii at the time. I'll be interested to hear their take on it. :)

The problem with sloppy work is that the supply FAR EXCEEDS the demand
 
IRstuff,
I was surprised that you found all those things "good" and "positive".
 
8:07 AM. False alarm generated by HI Emergency Management Authority. That false alarm is automatically broadcast on all HI TV, radio, and to all HI cell phones.

8:10 AM. The US Pacific command reports to the governors office and Hawaii Emergency Management Authority that there was no attack in progress. HI police notified that the previous alarm was false.

8:30 AM. The (democrat) Governor of HI put a notice out on HIS Facebook page that this was a false alarm.
(Does he think this is an adequate response?)

8:45 AM. HI EMA announced that this was a false alarm, releases automatic message notice to Emergency Action network.

(NO automatic updates nor corrections notice was sent to all stations nor to any cell phone networks was reported coming from HI EMA between 8:10 and 8:45! But notice that the original "false alarm" notification was sent specifically DURING a test of the system, and thus IMMEDIATELY known that it was a false alarm! Even if the button-pusher civil employee bueaucrat failed to notice he pushed the wrong button, he KNEW there was no actual attack, his boss KNEW there was no actual attack in progress, his supervisor AND the HI EMA KNEW there was no actual attack going on! )

(By the way, is it not odd that the original "20 minute nuclear attack alert" was exceeded by more than twice the flight time before anyone "noticed" that there were no nuclear bombs going off, and that the first alert was demonstrably false? Your government at work!)
 
"I was surprised that you found all those things "good" and "positive"."

Trump took credit, ipso, he thought they were good. The economy grew; that was a good thing. Most everything else was a disaster, so all the more reason...

"8:07 AM. False alarm generated by HI Emergency Management Authority. That false alarm is automatically broadcast on all HI TV, radio, and to all HI cell phones."

Apparently, no one in HI Emergency Management Authority was subscribed to the emergency broadcast???


TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top