The staffer involved is refusing to cooperate in the investigation. No reports on why not, but I wonder if he’s lawyered up. They’re also saying now that while he was reassigned, he’s not been back to work since that day.
Interesting. When this happened in 1971, the employee who put in the real (instead of test) tape was not fired. Don’t know if he was reassigned, though. But times change.
I’m somewhat interested in the refusal cooperate, but cooperating isn’t always in one’s best interest, even if it was an honest mistake. Words can get twisted, and so on.
BTW, has anyone (particularly in Hawaii) heard any conspiracy theories on this? No one in my real world (far from Hawaii) has even mentioned the incident, which is understandable. But you often get fringier theories online. Sometimes with many upvotes/likes/etc. One I’ve heard is that the system was hacked, and no one wants to admit it. The other was that there actually was a missile, but it was shot down (so many reasons that doesn’t work). But since people aren’t talking about the event anymore on most sites I frequent, I haven’t heard those repeated again in the last week. And since nothing really happened (no death or destruction), I expect these conspiracy hypotheses will die off as the entire thing is forgotten.
(underline added)
Who is this “They” you are referring to? Just in case anyone wanted to follow the story line.
We constantly hear the advice: Say nothing to police but name, (and rank and serial number?) and “Lawyer!” Given this, wouldn’t refusal to cooperate be the default?
-KSBW
I don’t blame him.
I remember this from the evening news. Apologies from those responsible were profuse, and they added information on changes in methodology that they immediately instituted to ensure it couldn’t happen again. The result? If the report was accurate, it happened again within days but was immediately cancelled. Great job, folks! :LoL
The only reason to fire (or even reassign) the person responsible would be if they represented a continuing threat to the security or reputation of emergency services.
It is often said that another word for mistake is experience. I truly doubt that the person responsible for this would repeat this mistake. There is a story, told by Warren Buffet I believe, about a young stock trader who made a mistake costing his firm something like $2million. Once he realized what he had done, he walked into the firm’s president’s office with a letter of resignation. The president refused it, saying that he had just spent $2million in training him and he couldn’t afford paying that much training someone else.
Now, if the guilty party did this purposefully, or does not grasp the severity of what they did, yeah, firing or reassignment is called for. But, if it was just an honest mistake, such actions are not only uncalled for, but lower the effectiveness of the system.
I would have to really see, just how easy it is to send a real alert instead of just a test of the system. It would not surprise me one bit that it’s an old interface, that has few safeguards.
It’s pretty standard practice that when someone fucks up really bad, or sometimes even slightly bad, he has to go (or a suitable scapegoat has to go), and that person’s boss, and the boss’s boss, and so on for several layers up the food chain, just to somehow “prove” the credibility of the organization. It’s just a standard PR stunt to let heads roll to satisfy the ravenous public.
AP Radio News just reported he was fired on Friday for failing to notice that it was a drill and had difficulty differentiating drills from reality on at least two prior occasions.
It’s beginning to sound as though the management completely dropped the ball with plenty of miscommunication - and are now furiously attempting to blame the employee. Several of the official statements seem to have been, well, not actually true. When people blame equipment, then various people, it sounds like flailing attempts to deflect.
The initial story about clicking the wrong item on a drop-down menu may have been crafted to try to cover up an ongoing personnel failure at the agency in allowing a troubled employee to remain in a sensitive position.
Nope, not a single conspiracy theory here that I’ve heard of. Presumably, Hawaiians have more sense than that.
As already mentioned by others, the staffer in question has been fired due to multiple occasions of getting drills and real life mixed up. Oh well. I still say the system should not be designed where something like this could happen so easily, but it is starting to sound like the employee was a doofus. This is just the first time it got this far.
Checking in to second **Siam Sam’**s account. My conversations with actual people in Hawaii and listening to local coverage on the radio match his comments.
Well, at least nothing like this could ever happen at the federal level.
:rolleyes:
I think the staffer is now claiming: “They didn’t fire me. I quit!”
He’s also claiming he believed 100 percent that the alert was real. I saw an interview of him (face blacked out to hide his identity), and man, was he ever jiggy hand-twisting foot-tapping shaking nervous.
Slightly saterical but otherwise quite interesting analysis of the way the error was handled by management.
Some other staffer was erroneously “outed” as the button pusher and has been getting all kinds of death threats.
Brutal article about this event and the general state of Hawaii governance.