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Fake 'Inbound Missile' Alert Sent To Every Cellphone in Hawaii (chicagotribune.com)
"Somebody sent out a false emergency alert to all cell phones in Hawaii saying, 'BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL'," writes Slashdot reader flopwich, adding "Somebody's had better days at work." The Associated Press reports:
In a conciliatory news conference later in the day, Hawaii officials apologized for the mistake and vowed to ensure it will never happen again. Hawaii Emergency Management Agency Administrator Vern Miyagi said the error happened when someone hit the wrong button. "We made a mistake," said Miyagi. For nearly 40 minutes, it seemed like the world was about to end in Hawaii, an island paradise already jittery over the threat of nuclear-tipped missiles from North Korea...
On the H-3, a major highway north of Honolulu, vehicles sat empty after drivers left them to run to a nearby tunnel after the alert showed up, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported. Workers at a golf club huddled in a kitchen fearing the worst... The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency tweeted there was no threat about 10 minutes after the initial alert, but that didn't reach people who aren't on the social media platform. A revised alert informing of the "false alarm" didn't reach cellphones until 38 minutes later, according to the time stamp on images people shared on social media.
On the H-3, a major highway north of Honolulu, vehicles sat empty after drivers left them to run to a nearby tunnel after the alert showed up, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported. Workers at a golf club huddled in a kitchen fearing the worst... The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency tweeted there was no threat about 10 minutes after the initial alert, but that didn't reach people who aren't on the social media platform. A revised alert informing of the "false alarm" didn't reach cellphones until 38 minutes later, according to the time stamp on images people shared on social media.
Don't they have the ability to send an "all clear" over the same channel they sent the "LOOK OUT YOU'RE ABOUT TO DIE!!!" message?
No, apparently they do not:
"[Emergency alerts] aren't like text messages, where a sender can dash off a quick 'sorry my bad' if they mistype. IPAWS notices have a specific format, which must be composed formally and in advance. Audio files for broadcast notices must be recorded or generated and uploaded. Often, this has to be done by special software on special equipment."
https://www.theatlantic.com/te...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Yes and no. Yes, they can easily get a list of everyone's number, but no, it is a little more difficult to locate each individual number at any given time.
Instead, the broadcasts are sent based on connected tower. Think of it just like a broadcast packet on a LAN Subnet. Phones connected to the particular towers (in this case, literally every single tower in the state) received the message.
This is also pretty much the same system the AMBER alter system uses.
Scaring the crap out of everyone is considered "a state exercise?"
It was a mistake by state officials, plain and simple.
Hawaii officials give timeline of events surrounding false alarm
Approx. 8.05 a.m.: A routine internal test during a shift change was initiated. This was a test that involved the Emergency Alert System, the Wireless Emergency Alert, but no warning sirens.
8.07 a.m.: A warning was erroneously triggered statewide by an employee at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency (HI-EMA).
8.10 a.m.: State Adjutant Maj. Gen. Joe Logan validated with the US Pacific Command that there was no missile launch.
Honolulu Police Department notified of the false alarm by HI-EMA.
8.13 a.m.: State Warning Point issues a cancellation of the Civil Danger Warning Message. This would have prevented the initial alert from being rebroadcast to phones that may not have received it yet. For instance, if a phone was not on at 8.07am, it would not receive the alert later on.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Scaring the crap out of everyone is considered "a state exercise?"
Yes.
It was a state warning system activated by state employees that was sent to everyone in the state of Hawaii.
The clear meaning is that there was no federal involvement in the alert.
Ken
Trump is trying to create... a problem in Korea where there has never been one before?
You can't be that stupid.
Ever heard of the Korean War? They made a tv show about it called M.A.S.H., it was quite popular.
There was also a movie, called Team America, that explored some of the issues involved with North Korea.
Every president since Eisenhower has had to deal with a "North Korea Problem", even Obama, the difference is Trump isn't trying to bribe North Korea to get them to pretend to suspend their nuclear weapons efforts...
Ken
Duck and cover, mocked endlessly, is a good way to react. If you are close enough either the radiation or the blast will kill you outright, but that's a pretty small area (particularly when its a maybe 20kt fission weapon from Korea, probably with an impact trigger). Otherwise, your biggest danger is from the flying debris. Ducking out of the way of flying glass and getting under some substantial cover to avoid falling roofs and ceilings will certainly raise your odds of getting through it.
Baby boomer here. I remember when they taught this shit in school. Stay in your house, away from windows, keep curtains drawn. Have a battery radio and fill up containers with drinking water.
There are multiple ways for a nuclear strike to kill you: ionizing radiation burn, pressure wave, thermal radiation burn, firestorm, and fallout. Each has its own characteristic radius within which you will probably die from it, but your chances are improved by being inside.
You car would be a bad idea for many reasons unless it is in a garage. If your car is outside it will get quickly covered with very hot short-lived radioactive fallout. The gamma rays will cut through your car like it wasn't even there. You want physical distance to cut down your radiation dose until the hottest isotopes decay. The area in which the fallout will kill you quickly actually begins to contract after only an hour or so, even though the fallout is spreading. The area in which short exposures to fallout represents a health risk starts to drop after a day.
Get inside, stay inside, listen on the radio for the all clear.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I really liked this TED talk about it: Surviving a Nuclear Attack.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Nope. The radius of destructive effect rises as the 2/3 power of yield. That's because the energy is dissipated in a three dimensional volume, and you're calculating the radius of intersection of that volume with a two dimensional surface. TL;DR: 20x the yield equals 7x the destructive radius.
Anyhow you can look up on the expected fatal radius by bomb type and yield, and the immediately fatal thermal effects of the warhead NK tested for an unprotected individual would be less than 5 miles, although many closer would survive because of shelter. Honolulu is about 12 miles across. If you put the warhead in the geographic center of the city to maximize casualties a lot of people on either end will survive. A lot of them will be uninjured too. The 5 psi blast radius is only three miles, outside that radius even residential buildings will still stand and people shaded by them will likely escape uninjured if they can get inside before the fallout.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.