Hawaii Emergency Management has interface of links which makes for easy mistakes

Hawaii Civil Beat reports on the many problems at the Hawaii Emergency management.

A screenshot of the controls for signaling a ballistic missile alert are a list of hyperlinks which are mixed in with links to drills, road closures and surf warnings. The operator was supposed to click on a drill but set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday. The operator clicked the PACOM (CDW) State Only link. The drill link is the one that was supposed to be clicked.

The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency sent the emergency alerts warning as text messages to tens of thousands of cellphones at about 8:07 Saturday morning. It took the agency 38 minutes to send a second alert letting the public know that the first emergency alert was a false alarm.

State officials said a worker triggered the false alarm by clicking a mouse on the wrong item on a computer screen while performing a routine internal test of the system.

The worker also reportedly clicked on a second warning prompt that asked if he really wanted to carry out the action.

There is a separate picture of Hawaii Emergency Management with a system password written on a post it that was stuck to a computer screen.