Nearly a year after a false missile alert was issued across Hawaii, legislators have taken another step toward addressing the issue of erroneous emergency alerts.

On Dec. 17, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Reliable Emergency Alert Distribution Improvement (READI) Act. The legislation will explore new ways of alerting the public through online video and audio streaming services, will track and study false alerts when they occur, will alter the way states plan for emergency alerts, and will help ensure more people receive relevant emergency alerts on mobile phones, televisions and radios.

The legislation will also give the federal government the primary responsibility of alerting the public of a missile threat. The bill was introduced by U.S. Senators Brian Schatz (D-Hawai‘i), John Thune (R-S.D.), and Roger Wicker (R-Miss.).

In short, the READI Act is designed to:

• Ensure more people receive emergency alerts by eliminating the option to opt out of receiving certain federal alerts, including missile alerts, on mobile phones;
• Require active alerts issued by the president or FEMA to be repeated. Currently, alerts on TV or radio may only be played once;
• Explore updating the system to offer emergency alerts over the internet, including to audio and video online streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify;
• Encourage state emergency communications committees to periodically review and update their state emergency alert system plans, which are often out of date;
• Compel the Federal Emergency Management Agency to create best practices for state, tribal, and local governments to use for issuing alerts, avoiding false alerts, and retracting false alerts if they occur, as well as for alert origination training and plans for officials to contact each other and federal officials during emergencies; and
• Establish a reporting system for false alerts so the FCC can track when they occur and examine their causes.

“When a missile alert went out across Hawaii in January, some people never got the message on their phones, while others missed it on their TVs and radios,” said Sen. Schatz, who serves on the Senate Communications, Technology, Innovation, and the Internet Subcommittee.

“Even though it was a false alarm, the missile alert highlighted real ways we can improve the way people receive emergency alerts. [This] bill fixes some of these issues and will help make sure that in an emergency, the public gets the right information they need as quickly as possible,” Schatz said

The National Association of Broadcasters supports the passage of the act, saying the legislation would help improve the timeliness, accuracy and availability of emergency alerts when disaster strikes.

“Local radio and TV broadcasters play a vital role as ‘first informers’ in keeping communities safe, and we understand the importance of relevant and up-to-date information when lives are at risk,” said NAB Executive Vice President of Communications Dennis Wharton.

The bill now moves on to the House of Representatives for consideration. 

WASHINGTON—Human error and inadequate safeguards contributed to the Jan. 13 false ballistic missile alert generated by the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency and transmitted to the public via the EAS and WEA systems, according to a preliminary report presented today during the FCC’s monthly open meeting.

The report, presented by James Wiley, attorney advisor at the FCC’s Cybersecurity and Communications Reliability Division, recounts the events of that Saturday morning and presents a timeline to put them into context.

The midnight shift supervisor at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency “specifically decided to drill at the shift change” to assist in the training of the day shift’s warning officers for a missile scenario “at a time when it would be challenging to properly respond,” the report said.

While the midnight supervisor verbally told the day-shift supervisor that a preparedness drill would be conducted, “a miscommunication” left that supervisor thinking the intention was to run the drill for the night-shift officers, it said. As a result, “the day shift supervisor was not in the proper location to supervise the day shift warning officers” when the drill began, the report said.

The midnight supervisor began the drill at 8:05 a.m. by pretending to be U.S. Pacific Command during a call to the day-shift warning officers. That supervisor played back a recording which began by saying “exercise” three times. However, it also included a sentence saying: “This is not a drill,” the report revealed.

A written statement from the day-shift warning officer who initiated the false alarm acknowledged hearing “this is not a drill” but not “exercise, exercise, exercise.” Seated at the alert origination terminal, the day-shift warning officer “clicked ‘yes’ to transmit the alert,” the report said.

“In speaking with the Bureau, other emergency management agencies stressed the importance of proper drill supervision, and that conducting a drill without proper supervision would not be tolerated,” the report said.

The report also concluded that the midnight shift supervisor played a recording that “deviated from the script of the agency’s established drill procedure,” specifically one that included the sentence “This is not a drill.” The other human error identified in the report was that of warning officer, who failed to recognize the message as part of an exercise while other warning officers on duty did, it said.

The report also laid out several inadequate safeguards that contributed to the false alarm being transmitted to the public, including:

•The lack of procedures to prevent a single person from sending an erroneous missile alert;

•No requirement to double check with a colleague or to get a supervisor to signoff before sending the alert;

•An “atypical number of no-notice drills” being conducted by the state, which increased the potential for error; and

•No difference in the alert software used by the state to differentiate between a test and live alert, the lack of different system log-ins for test and live alerts and no unique confirmation language to emphasize that the message about to be sent would be a live alert.

Once the errant alert was sent, matters were made worse “by the delay in authoritatively correcting the misinformation,” the report said. 

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai identified two things in particular that he found to be “most troubling” in a separate statement. “…[O]ur investigation has found so far: (1) Hawaii’s Emergency Management Agency didn’t have reasonable safeguards in place to prevent human error from resulting in the transmission of a false alert; and (2) Hawaii’s Emergency Management Agency didn’t have a plan for what to do if a false alert was transmitted,” Pai said.

“The public needs to be able to trust that when the government issues an emergency alert, it is indeed a credible alert,” he said. “Otherwise, people won’t take alerts seriously and respond appropriately when a real emergency strikes and lives are on the line.”

WASHINGTON—The former head of Federal Emergency Management Agency says the recent false missile warning incident in Hawaii provides an opportunity for local and federal government agencies to review their emergency alerting systems and also said that the event illustrated the important role television and radio broadcasters play during emergencies. 

In a column on Morning Consult, Craig Fugate, who was FEMA administrator during the Obama administration, said the incident raised important questions about the nation’s emergency alerting system, but added that “this incident also offers an opportunity for everyone to review their own emergency preparedness plans.”

He also pointed out the importance of having “trustworthy sources of information,” during such emergencies. “During times of crisis, the public’s best source for information is a communications network that has kept people safe for decades—their local broadcaster,” he wrote. 

He added that broadcasters were among the first to alert the public that the missile warning was a mistake. “Many stations were able to confirm on air that it was a false alarm just minutes after the initial alert, well before public safety officials passed that news to the public,” he wrote. 

Acknowledging the reality that more and more citizens get their news and information from wireless devices now, Fugate noted the importance of smartphone apps like NextRadio that allow listeners to listen to live local radio stations over cellular. He singled out Apple for remaining a holdout in the effort to activate radio enabled chipsets in its iPhones. “At a time when the public needs access to more information—not less—Apple should to the right thing and voluntarily unlock radio chips in iPhones,” he wrote.

He also noted the significance of the Next Gen TV standard (aka “ATSC 3.0). “With the new standard, broadcasters could deliver multimedia content such as interactive evacuation maps, videos and pictures during emergencies to help the public avoid dangerous situation,” he wrote.

HONOLULU—Scott Humber, news director of Hawaii News Now—the combined news operation of Raycom Media’s KHNL and KGMB in Honolulu—was upstairs in his bedroom at 8:07 a.m. last Saturday (Jan. 13) when he heard the alarm on his phone go off downstairs.

Scott Humber

“My wife came upstairs immediately and she was crying,” says Humber. “I took a second to calm her down, looked down at my phone and saw the alert.”

“BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

While his first reaction was disbelief because he didn’t hear civil defense sirens, Humber tuned his TV to his station and saw the EAS alert. What ensued for Humber and many broadcasters across the islands revealed not simply the vulnerability of the Emergency Alert System to human error upstream of their stations, but other threats to effective emergency communications to the public, such as the need for dependable two-way communications channels among critical station personnel as well as between stations and civil defense managers in the event of an emergency.

GET THE WORD OUT

Shortly after the warning went out, Humber received a call from one of his on-air talent saying that the alert was a false alarm. A neighbor who works for Hawaii Civil Defense ran to the talent’s house to say the alarm was in error.

A split second later, Humber’s assignment manager called to say the Honolulu Police Department, which got word the alarm was false three minutes after it was issued, was saying it wasn’t real, he says. With a second source confirming the error, Humber called his digital team and told them to get word out immediately on the station’s app that the alarm was false.

Humber’s luck with the phone ran out, however, when it came to alerting the station’s master control operators of the false alarm.

“Our first thought was we needed to get a crawl up on the air, but we couldn’t get through to our master control,” he says. Giving up on a voice call, Humber ultimately reached master control via text to instruct the MC operators to air an all-clear, which went on air by 8:30 a.m., he says.

At about that time, Humber made it into the station as did many of the station’s reporters and anchors who interrupted NCAA basketball on KGMB and a Premier League soccer game on KHNL with wall-to-wall coverage of the story for about four hours.

‘WORKED AS INTENDED’

If there is a silver lining to this false alarm event, it is that the EAS system’s over-the-air and IPAWS delivery succeeded in delivering the emergency alert as designed. “I would say the initial alert worked as intended,” says Chris Leonard, president of the Hawaii Association of Broadcasters and president and GM of New West Broadcasting, which operates five radio stations on the Big Island of Hawaii.

“It hit the air chain for our five radio stations. It hit the air chain for wireless devices for the wireless alert, and a crawl showed up on television stations as well.”

Participating EAS broadcasters don’t have a lot of flexibility in those first moments of a warning, he says.

“You have to take the alert at face value. It came through a verifiable source—in this case Hawaii Emergency Management—and our instruction to listeners was to proceed as advised. Shelter in place and heed the warning,” he says.

At 8:24 a.m., however, Leonard received a call from the mayor of Hilo at New West’s main studio that the message was a false alarm, which was followed one minute later by a recorded message from the emergency operating center to take to the air chain to announce the all-clear, he says.

By about 8:24 or 8:25 a.m., the broadcaster was on air alerting the public that the alarm was false. New West also pushed the all-clear to social media, he says.

‘A SHORT FUSE EVENT’

Where the system broke down was the failure of the state’s emergency management staff to use EAS to convey that the original warning was false until about 8:45 a.m., he says.

“I think the concern with that [using the EAS system to push the all-clear], although I don’t agree, is that typically we don’t receive an alert for something that is not happening. You don’t receive an alert that a flash flood warning is over,” says Leonard.

However, EAS does support issuing a message to inform the public of a false alarm by using an administrative code, he says. [The EAS system relies on predefined codes to trigger specific types of warnings, such as a hurricane or a tsunami.]

Courtney Harrington, chair of the state emergency communications committee in Hawaii, says that even if a specific EAS code to retract a warning does not exist, that is no excuse for not improvising by using the system’s other resources to inform broadcasters of a warning sent in error.

“If there is no code for withdraw, then send the message out under civil emergency,” he says. “There’s all kinds of codes that will trigger people. Who cares? Pick one. Implement. Thank you.”

Harrington, who is appointed by the FCC as the leader of the committee which oversees how Hawaii’s broadcasters use EAS, says a big part of the problem with the missile alert was that it was a “short fuse” event. In other words, from the time the alert was issued to expected impact of a missile is about 15 to 20 minutes versus the 72 hours that’s typical between the time a hurricane warning is issued and it arrives, he says.

With such a short fuse, there’s little time for the media and state emergency managers to communicate. Compounding the problem, are phone lines jammed with “everybody calling to see if their aunty is OK,” he says.

Regardless, the EAS system isn’t designed to be second guessed, he says. “One of the biggest questions I get from broadcasters is, ‘If this happens again, how do we confirm it?’ And my response is you can’t, and you shouldn’t,” says Harrington.

“This whole system, regardless of where you are in the country, is based upon trust. When an official on the government side activates the system, you must be confident there is a legitimate reason to do that.”

New West Broadcasting’s Leonard echoes that sentiment. “From a broadcaster’s perspective, when we receive an alert, it’s already been vetted and authenticated, and it’s not subject to our interpretation. We are required to forward that to our air chain and ultimately to our listeners,” says Leonard.