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False Hawaii Missile Alert Sent After Drill Recording Said 'This Is Not A Drill' (npr.org)
A false ballistic missile alert in Hawaii was sent on January 13 because an emergency worker believed there really was a missile threat, according to a preliminary investigation by The Federal Communications Commission. From a report: The report finds that the false alert was not the result of a worker choosing the wrong alert by accident from a drop-down menu, but rather because the worker misunderstood a drill as a true emergency. The drill incorrectly included the language "This is not a drill."
> Funny, it said it wasn't a drill, so the worker treated the alert as the real deal.
Exactly. The worker did not misunderstand the message - the message *was* wrong.
For most mistakes made in a professional setting, it is usually a failure in the process vs a mistake of the individual.
Having been the person who had hit the go button to kick off a colossal failure. I can tell you it could happen to anyone. I have gotten approvals and did every step I was suppose to do. However the process had shortcuts because no one wanted to deal with the full complexity or waste their departments resources on looking at it. So they had blanketed approved the data where I was the one who hit the start button.
I didn't get into any trouble, but I had documented all the approvals. However I was the first on the list to be questioned. So I can feel for the guy who is under the public pressure for pushing the button to send.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It sounds to me like they didn't want to spend resources improving/replacing their existing system, so they decided to say it's a human's fault instead of a system's fault.
At some level it is essentially always a human's fault if there was a human decision involved at any point. It might be the human(s) who designed the system or the one(s) who built the system or the one(s) who operated the system but at some level it is a human failure. That's why when someone tells you "the computer failed" they are saying a false statement because while it might not have been their fault, it almost certainly wasn't the fault of the machine - it was the fault of some person somewhere. The machine is simply doing exactly what it was designed and instructed to do. If something bad happens and you trace back why far enough the answer almost always is that some person made a mistake.
Now I'm not talking about blame here. That's different. It rarely is a productive exercise to seek out the person who failed and (figuratively) execute them. Most mistakes are unintentional and caused by putting a person in a situation where they were set up to fail. It's more useful to figure out how to design the system so that the failure mode cannot recur. Fix the problem, not the blame.
(Yes I'm aware that technically computers can actually make mistakes but this is so rare as to be inconsequential to my point - and even then those errors are typically errors made by the designer of the machine making it insufficiently robust)
Depends on how serious you are about your drills. After all, the real thing isn't going to be scheduled a day in advance, so a drill that is doesn't really tell you how well prepared you are for the real thing.