Feds say state didn’t need to wait on them for missile-alert correction – KHON2

The state said Saturday that waiting for federal approval was one of the reasons it took so long to issue a cancellation message on the same system that had carried the false alarm. But Always Investigating learned directly from the feds that wasn’t true.

FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told KHON2 not only is their permission and approval not needed for messages, but that it’s been that way ever since the state applied to use the wireless emergency alert system about six years ago. Now the state tells us it was really seeking FEMA advice, not approval, before sending out the all-clear to all cell phones 38 minutes later.

FEMA provides a system called IPAWS — the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System. Think of it as a backbone that local authorities, like the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency (HI-EMA) then latch on to, but first have to build or buy their own software interfaces to write and broadcast alerts directly to your cell phone.

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That’s how messages, whether things like tsunami warnings or Saturday’s false missile threat, blare on your cellular handset.

But what about retractions or all-clears? The state said Saturday, and wrote on their timeline of false-alarm events, that they had to wait for federal approval to text false alarm through the same IPAWS mass alert system that carried the first alert.

Here’s how Vern Miyagi, HI-EMA administrator, described it Saturday: “At 8:45 a.m. after getting authorization from FEMA’s IPAWS Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, HI-EMA issued a civil emergency message that verbally alerted people that this was false. a missile was not incoming. This was false alarm.”

KHON2 went directly to FEMA documentation of the IPAWS system and found messaging is locally, not federally, controlled. So we checked directly with FEMA whose spokesperson told Always Investigating: “FEMA approval was not required to send the retraction message.”

FEMA told us Hi-EMA didn’t have to wait.

“The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency possesses the authority to cancel or retract Hawaii Emergency Management Agency-initiated warnings, without intervention or approval from FEMA,” Eileen Lainez, FEMA spokesperson, told Always Investigating.

Approval was not needed per FEMA, yet that’s where the state told us Saturday they lost a lot of time. We showed those responses to U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz who said, “This is deeply frustrating. That’s quite bad, but even if there were some rule that required you to go back to FEMA, somebody should have used their judgment to just go ahead and retract it.”

KHON2 asked HI-EMA, why the discrepancy?

“I’m not going to say it was needed,” HI-EMA spokesperson Richard Rapoza said. “At this point that’s part of our investigation to see if it was absolutely required, but the answer wasn’t clear to us at the time.”

KHON2 asked, why cast it as an authorization and approval needed on Saturday?

“I think there was actually some confusion at the time,” Rapoza said. “When Vern and the governor and various people spoke Saturday, we were right on the heels of a big event. And so getting all of our information straight, making sure everybody understood exactly what was going on, was a bit of a challenge. So people might have used words, they may have used nomenclature, that may have characterized things in a way that was fast or convenient as opposed to absolutely carefully worded.”

HI-EMA now tells Always Investigating they called FEMA for guidance on how to distribute the all-clear, asking for help, not permission, on how to send a correction.

“Because it wasn’t built into the system it wasn’t absolutely clear what appropriate channel of IPAWS was to send the message out,” Rapoza said.

KHON2 asked: Why even take the time to even ask what’s “appropriate” again when the most inappropriate thing had just happened?

“At that point there’s an argument made that we didn’t want to add insult to injury and start running around just trying one thing after another,” Rapoza said. “It’s important to do it properly.”

“The state called us that morning to discuss the false alert and to ask for technical guidance, which we provided during that call,” FEMA’s spokesperson told KHON2.

“Confidence is close to zero, so the only way you’re going to be able to rebuild confidence is to be totally truthful about what happened. There are no excuses there is no way to make this sound better than it really is, we just have to work on fixing this,” Schatz said.

FEMA tells me they are “in contact with the State of Hawaii, FEMA Region IX, and the FCC, gathering more details to understand how this occurred, and how to prevent such occurrences in the future.”

FEMA tries to head these kinds of mistakes off with standard guidance, such as a 2015 field guide for states and agencies to build their front-end interfaces with an “easily accessed ‘Cancel’ function. Yet despite that advice from FEMA in black and white, dating back years, HI-EMA had no cancel button before Saturday.

“It’s outrageous the idea they had difficulty retracting this message that caused everybody to panic shows that they hadn’t really thought this thing through,” Schatz said. “FEMA instructed our state agencies on how to set this thing up, they were not ready for prime time, and that’s what this thing was.”

As to why other agencies here who knew it was false couldn’t just trigger an IPAWS correction while HI-EMA waited?

We found out Hawaii is one of only a handful of states and territories that have only one agency signed up to use IPAWS. In the vast majority of states, the counties, police, sheriffs, even some private agencies can use the FEMA IPAWS system to write and send alerts to all of their region’s cellular handsets.

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