The CDC confirms that the alarm against fake missiles in Hawaii was scary

A Twitter badysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that people were terrified when they were alerted that a ballistic missile was heading for Hawaii. But when they learned that the alert was actually a false alarm, they were livid.

This is something that viewers have already guessed, but this badysis could help emergency management agencies send better alerts in the future. (Step 1: Do not send false warnings about nuclear missiles.) The communications disaster unfolded last January when a series of major mistakes sent a terrifying warning to residents' telephones and TVs. Hawaii. A ballistic missile was en route to the islands and the inhabitants had to seek shelter. It took 38 minutes for the alarm to be removed, a period during which people posted on Twitter en mbade.

One of the key themes that emerged as a result of this incident is that some people did not know what to do in a ballistic missile attack, according to the new CDC document published in the Weekly report on morbidity and mortality. The findings indicate to public health officials that social media is a good place to reach people in times of crisis and that future emergency alerts need to have clear instructions on what people need to do. In a radiological emergency such as an attack by a nuclear missile, these instructions are as follows: "penetrate inside, stay inside and stay in the l '. listen, "according to the CDC. Of course, this does not help prevent fake alarms, but that's another story.

In today's study, researchers looked for tweets – or, as they usefully explain, "(Twitter messages)" – from the morning of the false alarm. The team specifically searched for tweets containing the words "missile and Hawaii", "ballistic", "shelter", "forest", "threat", "alert" or "alarm". They ended up with more than 127,000 tweets. Of these, most were retweets and quote tweets, which they excluded to keep the information to a reasonable amount.

They ended up with more than 14,000 tweets sent over the 38-minute period when people thought that the missile alert was real and within 38 minutes of his false revelation. Right after the end of the alert, people expressed their shock, shared the missile alert with others and tried to understand what was happening. People identified in military and intelligence accounts, in the media, told their families that they loved them.

After the alert was removed, the tone changed: people were pissed off, and they expressed their frustration on Twitter. The study contained some highlights, although it wrote blasphemy: "How do you accidentally send a complete message? [expletive deleted] Emergency alert indicating that a missile arrives in Hawaii and that it is necessary to take shelter. AND TAKE THIRTY MINUTES TO CORRECT?!? Some said they would have a hard time trusting future emergency alerts. And others said they did not know what to do when they were asked to look for shelter: "My friend and I were running into the hotel room in panic, because HOW DO WE DEPEND ON A SHELTER? [expletive deleted] MISSILE?!"

While tweets open a window on this frenetic 16-minute hour, it's hard to know, judging from social media reactions, what people in Hawaii really thought about, according to David Alexander, a professor of risk reduction and Disasters at University College London, who was not involved in the study. "At the moment, it is almost impossible to answer the question, using social media, to know what is the consensus on a problem," he said. The edge in an email.

Bhavini Patel Murthy, lieutenant-commander of the US public, however, believes that the fact that there was confusion during the missile alert could help emergency management agencies to send better alerts to the US. Future, including clearer measures for people to try to protect themselves. health department and senior author of the study. "We have learned that we need to make sure our messages are clear so people know what to do in case of an emergency," she says. "We want to make sure we get the right message at the right time." We hope that no one will need to try the "good" missile alert any time soon.