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Hawaii Missile Alert Worker Fired, Will Sue State for Defamation (khon2.com)
This week Hawaii finally fired the employee who issued a false missile alert warning to the entire state, while the head of the state's emergency management agency resigned, another official quit, and a fourth was suspended over the incident. But new details also emerged about the incident:
- After alerting workers on the wrong shift, the night supervisor "had started the drill by calling the day shift warning officers, who had not been told there was to be an exercise, and pretending to be U.S. Pacific Command," reports the Guardian, citing the FCC's investigation. The investigation confirmed that his script for the drill included the phrase "this is not a drill" (though it also began and ended with the words "exercise, exercise, exercise.")
- The New York Daily News reports that the warning officer missed those words "because someone in the office picked up the receiver instead of hitting the speaker." And he insists that "I'm really not to blame in this. It was a system failure. And I did what I was trained to do. I can't say that I would do anything differently based on what I saw and heard." His lawyer adds that "The place was a circus and they got their scapegoat... All that was missing were clowns and balloons."
- The fired worker now plans to sue the state of Hawaii for defamation, and possibly also for libel and slander, according to his lawyer, "because they lied about what happened." He also says that his client has already received numerous death threats.
- Washington Post audience editor says the incident happened "because Hawaii rewards incompetence," noting the employee behind the missile alert "had a history of performance problems and had been 'a source of concern,'" adding that the FCC reported that previously the employee "has confused real life events and drills on at least two separate occasions."
Not a drill
If it said not a drill, it's not his fault. Fire the person who added "not a drill" to a drill.
... to let the courts, and not public opinion, sort this one out.
Close enough for government work.
firing just leads to people covering up errors and blame passing. or people slowing work down to the point where you need 2-3 people to sign off to get stuff done.
To avoid issues, government HR briefs supervisors that when commenting on the dismissal of an employee, or providing a reference or confirmation of employment that is is important NOT to provide a characterization of service. In other words you say:
The fact they provided, to the press, a characterization of his service, include details about his past issues, the State of Hawaii should probably settle and then brief their Emergency Management folks to keep their &^%*ing mouths shut next time.
Sounds like this was a system failure with plenty of culpability at several levels, though it is, in the end, the essential responsibility of the agency head that his agency can do its job. And it appears there were previous symptoms of the systemic problems. It is well known that warning test messages should NOT be worded like a real warning message precisely because it causes confusion. It should be like "in place of this message you would have received a description of the threat..." etc. The test is to test the *delivery* of the message, in which case the message content does not matter other than it should do everything possible to not create the impression of an actual emergency. Tornado sirens, for example, are only tested on clear days.
firing just leads to people covering up errors and blame passing. or people slowing work down to the point where you need 2-3 people to sign off to get stuff done.
Completely agree. And what is worse it leads to the discouragement of those who truly care about serving the public with integrity and good faith in the work that they do! That is exactly why so many positions that require only people that care more than a pay check at a time are being filled with people who could care less and only seek the thrill of power...going all the way up to the POTUS!!!!
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
It's hard to judge without knowing all of the details. The last bullet point in the summary states "[T]he employee behind the missile alert 'had a history of performance problems and had been "a source of concern,"' . . . [and] the employee 'has confused real life events and drills on at least two separate occasions.'"
If that's true (and if it is there should probably be some documentation of it on record), it sounds like this guy should have been fired a long time ago. Maybe changing the protocol to prevent this kind of mistake from happening again does slow people down and result in more work, but it's pretty obvious that keeping incapable or incompetent individuals around eventually creates a substantially larger amount of work when something eventually goes wrong. It's a bit like not exercising because it takes up too much of your time in the immediate moment when in reality it's probably taking a decade or more off of your life in the long run. Only then it's too late to do much of anything about it.
Maybe that the UI is a mess and they over payed for POS software. The last story showed it to be big mess that was easy to make an error with.
Now it comes out that the worker did do the false warning part?? but in the past it was said that the system needed a lot manual steps to add it.
I think he should get a better lawyer.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's hard to judge fairlywithout knowing all of the details.
FTFY. Because half the reason we are in this mess it it's damn easy for people to judge off a clickbait headline.
...than the missile he erroneously sounded the alarm for.
I know there is for the State Dept. If so, it would probably help improve things if you could fire somebody and hire their replacement.
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Actually, keeping him in place led to 10 years of covering up errors -- and the reward for their forbearance was to finally hit the perfect storm where nobody was able to cover up for his incompetence in time.
Yes, people need to be fired when it's clear they're both ineffective and unable to change that. The alternative is what you see right here. They're supremely lucky nobody got seriously hurt/killed over this.
I worked for a computer software company that was bought by a much larger company. We found out that the new owners required employees to supply personal negatives when going in to performance assessments and that only negative assessment items would be added to the HR records specifically so that they could point to the negatives (and lack of positives) when they fired anyone. This company also had a policy that normal email systems could not be used for internal communications, and it seemed that this was so that outside investigators would not be able to find evidence trails. The president of the company was eventually convicted of deceiving stockholders.
I'm not saying that Hawaii emergency management operates in a similar shady fashion, but sometimes HR records are misleading.
So do many of the states and much of the US electorate. This is not new.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
It can be very difficult to fire a union worker without a strong track record of failure. It can also be unfair to fire someone for a single bad mistake if they have years of good productivity, or are under enormous work stress. This is why managers write "recovery plans", to give an employee a chance to improve.
Also, "The Peter Pinciple" still applies today, especially in unionized work. The book of that name described how people progress and get promoted until they are no longer competent enough to get promoted anymore. Many people have learned to refuse to be demoted back to where they _were_ competent and productive, because it poisons your resume and limits your income.and seniority in workplaces where that matters. I've had to be _very_ careful in my own career to avoid getting promoted to work I'd not do well: it startles many managers when an employee refuses a promotion.
You do NOT. PUT. THE. WORDS. this is not a drill IN. A. FUCKING. DRILL.
To the person or persons responsible for firing the guy, if, that is, I had the power to fire them, I would ask the following question: Yes means no, and no means yes. Would you like me to fire you?
Then I would totally fire them no matter what they said.
I myself have had to deal with incompetent morons in leadership positions who literally did not know the literal meanings of words they were using, including, yes, literally.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
Welcome to 2018. The budget for clowns and balloons has been cut so we can pay for tax cuts and The Wall.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Wrong, fire this person, everyone involved in any aspect of the operation of the test, and especially the people that created it in the first place without at least 2-person agreement before sending the mass alert. Fire them all. People in our gov't, especially associated with emergency operations must be held to the highest level of excellence and brutally punished when they fail. Let them go get some civilian job and fuck up there. We got 300M+ citizens; someone else can surely do better.
*Did* he screw up? Or did he do precisely what he was supposed to do in the presence of the received messages? "This is not a drill" is not something anyone sensible would add to a drill unless they intended to cause people to believe it was not a drill.
And *why* wasn't there any way to cancel, override, etc. the message? That's the real totally horrible oversight. Everything else is relatively minor...though I'd sure rake the guy who wrote that script over the coals.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
OTOH, what they're saying is that they KNEW their drill procedure created confusion and still said "this is not a drill" for a drill.
Somebody or other asserts that this guy has a history of incompetence. That may or may not be true. If true, it justifies firing him, as well as those who are responsible, but not instead of those who are responsible.
The real problem was that there was no way to cancel the alert. A secondary problem what the the drill included the phrase "This is not a drill". The guy who wrote the script should be demoted and moved to a position where he is not in charge of writing messages to others. But the main problem was that there was not way to cancel the alert.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The fact that they use Post-Its to write their passwords down has been normal behavior for some time now it seems. Why is this guy put front and center? This charade should end -- so don't even start --or end -- with him.
Try a different approach, say, what exactly do you want to fix?
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It gets curiouser and curiouser...
The first hint of incompetence was the repeated referral to a non-existent "button".
It was (apparently) a drop-down.
That smacks of a made-up excuse by some superior who was not familiar with the actual procedure.
Dilbert? Is that you?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The beatings will continue until the morale improves?
Is that what you're getting at?
Looks to be that you've been channeling Donald a bit too hard.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
In defense of the poor schmuck who wrote the code, a cancel message probably wasnâ(TM)t in the spec.
CYA across the board by everyone involved is what lead to the system failure here.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
firing just leads to people covering up errors and blame passing. or people slowing work down to the point where you need 2-3 people to sign off to get stuff done.
When it comes to activating state-wide emergency alarms maybe 2-3 people signing off on it would be a good idea.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Firing absolutely has to be on the decision tree somewhere, but not near the root of the tree for all the reasons you say. Firing is not a quick fix, except insofar as shielding other people responsible for a problem.
Given that the people who worked with the button-pusher had doubts about his ability to perform, and that this isn't the first time that employee has failed to distinguish between real and drill emergencies, there's obviously a lot more wrong with the way the agency handles performance issues, as well as with the way this particular drill was conducted. If that's not corrected, it could leave employees gun-shy in a real crisis.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The investigation confirmed that his script for the drill included the phrase "this is not a drill" (though it also began and ended with the words "exercise, exercise, exercise.")
Reminds me of the original Orson Wells 'War of the Worlds' broadcast which alerted listeners to it's fictional nature before and after each commercial break, but some didn't listen long enough to hear the disclaimers...
Why would you create an "exercise, exercise, exercise" that has as part of it's script the words "this is not a drill"? How did anyone think that was a good plan?
Ken
I heard you can Hire a Swatter online somewhere... Lol
[($)]
Did everyone, even outside of his state, a great service by showing how fucking pathetic the response was and just how unprepared we are for shit like this.
....they need to fire the dipshit that allowed an 'accidental' send of that (from what I heard, as the guy was trying to punch out).
My car has a "call for help" button, even THAT trivial thing is covered with a safety switch - push once to open and expose the ACTUAL button,
-Styopa
I mean, come on.
Got to love a lawyer with an appropriate level of sarcasm!
His lawyer adds that "The place was a circus and they got their scapegoat... All that was missing were clowns and balloons." #MikeDrop
I GTTFA and didn't see any explanation of how the employee who'd sent the alert "has confused real life events and drills on at least two separate occasions."
Were those other occasions actually his fault, or was it because some jackoff above him in management writes things like "This is not a drill" into the script and doesn't bother to hint otherwise until after the message is done with "exercise exercise exercise". I'd probably make a mistake too if circumstances were like that and it was my job to warn an entire state about a missile attack.
How long is the message anyways? Was it repeated several times and THEN ended with "exercise exercise exercise "? Are you supposed to wait until the very end after hearing "this is not a drill" or are you meant to 'leap into action'?
We're given very vague details, but journalists are more than happy to run with the claim that it was the fault of an employee who "made some people feel uncomfortable" and is 'Incompetent' (likely misinterpreted really poorly worded alerts twice).
If they guy was kept in a job he was seriously unsuited for, fire the supervisor or whoever made the personnel decision. There had to be a way to shuffle him off to other duties somewhere. Firing the guy who made the mistake accomplishes little, except to make people more reluctant to issue actual warnings.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
If they guy was kept in a job he was seriously unsuited for, fire the supervisor or whoever made the personnel decision. There had to be a way to shuffle him off to other duties somewhere.
Ok, so hang on. The employee shouldn't be fired for repeated incompetence, but the supervisor should be fired for repeated forbearance?
On a side note, if the only option for an employer with a dud employee is to "shuffle him off to other duties somewhere" (presumably to limit the potential damage he can do), that will make employers much more reluctant to take chances hiring people who don't have a demonstrably stellar record. I doubt that's what you really want.
Firing the guy who made the mistake accomplishes little, except to make people more reluctant to issue actual warnings.
And by the same logic, firing the supervisor for giving an incompetent employee another chance will make supervisors more reluctant to give incompetent employees another chance, and they'll just let the incompetent employee go the first time. Again, I doubt that's what you really want.
This was a critical job, and according to the stories I've read the employee wasn't up to it, and that the employee had screwed up more than once before. The employee might have done better elsewhere, perhaps with a less critical job. The person who made the decision to put a known risk in such a critical post is partly responsible for this. "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." - Montgomery Scott, chief engineer, Enterprise.
It is reasonable to fire an employee for incompetence, but it's also reasonable (and frequently cheaper) to see if there's other jobs the employee is better suited for. In cases where it's particularly hard to fire people, shuffling them off can be the best option. I also don't know how or why the employee screwed up before. If it's due to some sort of disability, the employer is required to try to figure out how to use the employee, and that often means moving the employee to a new job.
As far as firing the supervisor, this wasn't a case of a supervisor picking an employee and having a screw-up, from what I've read. If the employer has been unable to function in his duties on several occasions, that's more serious. One bad decision should not in general be a firing offense, but a pattern can be.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes