Branson Performer in Hawaii During Missile Threat, Local Officials Explain EAS Triggers
BRANSON MO NEWS:
SPRINGFIELD, Mo.– About a week into her and her family’s Hawaiian vacation, Branson performer Catherine Haygood was primarily using her phone as a camera. That is until it played the role of an emergency siren.”I was like it must be a flash flood or something cause it sounded like the weather alert on your iPhone and I have like one eye open reading the message and I’m like, what is going on,” said Haygood during a video-chat with KOLR10.She was one of the thousands, in Hawaii, sent the warning of an incoming missile attack Saturday.”It said ‘This is not a drill’. So we start thinking where are we going to go, what’re we going to do,” she describes.It was about the same time she learned the alert had been sent by mistake. That miles away, Greene County Missouri’s Office of Emergency Management Director, Larry Woods, was first hearing about the incident.”When you go in to use these systems, you forget to check a box or you check a box or inadvertently hit a button, it happens,” he said.Now according to Woods these warnings, depending on the threat level, can be sent from either a federal agency, like the national weather service, a state agency like Highway Patrol in the case of an amber alert, or a local agency like a county Emergency management office–each using a computerized broadcast trigger. “We don’t use them very often here,” Woods said of Greene County. While sending one of those hyper-local alerts can be rare, training is still frequent.”We try to be as vigilant as we can to make sure those things don’t happen,” he reassured reporters.Because according to Woods and what we’ve seen in Hawaii, mistakes are possible. “We just decided to stay …
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