C. Oregonians visiting Hawaii get missile scare
Central Oregonians looking to relax in paradise got the polar opposite of what they signed up for, for a frightening 30 minutes. People both living and vacationing in Hawaii were falsely alerted of an incoming missile strike over the weekend.
“It’s something about the trip I’ll never forget,” Mark Lavrar of Prineville said Monday. Lavrar was whale watching with his family when an alert popped up on his phone that read: “Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.”
“People were crying on the boat,” Lavrar said.
He called his daughter in California with a message. “(I said) that I loved her, and I just let her know what was happening, and we weren’t sure if it was real or not, but at least I wanted to tell her that I loved her,” Lavrar recalled.
Greg Sabin of Bend was in a condo on the Big Island with friends when all their phones went off. “My friend Jim went to look at his phone first, and he just got this sheepish look on his face and he said, ‘You guys, this isn’t funny.'”
The alert raised more questions than answers.
“Is it going to be the end of everybody’s life here? Or are we going to survive for weeks inside here, hoping that a cloud of radiation doesn’t come our way? Or what’s going to happen to everybody where this does hit?” Sabin said.
The follow-up message saying there was no threat came 38 minutes after the first alert.
“I was really irritated that better alerts hadn’t come across, that there wasn’t better information about where to go, that it took so long for them to announce (there was no missile). Over half an hour is kind of a long time to sit there thinking you’re going to blow up,” Sabin said.
He and his friends could not find any information on the local news, and learned the threat was false from his sons back home, before the second message went out.
“(It was an) amazing relief,” he said.
Sabin and Lavrar are now putting the experience behind them and enjoying the rest of their vacations.
“Hopefully, it doesn’t happen again. But it’s Hawaii. You just kind of move on and enjoy the sun,” Lavrar said.
