January 13, 2025

— Jim Carrey

Seek immediate shelter

It was a beautiful morning. But aren't they all in Hawaii?

A little below 80 degrees at the weather station in Oahu, with nearly no cloud cover: the kind of day that people on the mainland sometimes wish they had (but almost never get) at the beginning of January.

• Honeymooners were waking up in each others' arms in their hotel rooms. A woman named Lydia Warren and her husband were vacationing on the beach.
• A college student named Makena was showing her visiting boyfriend the Pearl Harbor memorial. (It's open at 7 a.m.; who knew?) Her father, a TV news producer named David Patterson, was on the freeway, about to dial into a conference call.
• Oh, and here's a quirky one: Actor and comedian Jim Carrey was up early, working on writing a memoir.

Then: panic. At 8:08 a.m., Hawaii's civil defense and emergency agency sent an alarming text to every single person in the state with a cell phone. It read, in all caps:

Local T.V. put a chyron message on the screen as well, against the backdrop of things like a college basketball game between Ole Miss and Florida, or else a Premier League soccer game from London between Tottenham Hotspur and Everton:

Can you even imagine? Of course, you probably remember this -- along with the fact that in the end, there was no inbound missile. By the way, the date was January 13, 2018, so seven years ago today.

In fact, officials at the civil defense agency realized this was a mistake pretty quickly, but it took them 38 minutes to confirm that and then figure out how to send a second message telling people that the first alert was in error.

There's a lot about this story - but the biggest part that has stayed with me is how people spent those 38 minutes when they thought they and everyone around them was going to die.

Lydia Warren and her husband raced back to their hotel -- not so much because they thought it would be safer, but because they thought that their bodies might be more easily identified someday if they were found near where they were staying.

David Patterson called his daughter and learned where she was. He told her to use her phone to record video of Pearl Harbor visitors processing the possibility of an imminent attack.

She later said this calmed her down, as she figured her father wouldn't tell her to spend what could be her last minutes videoing if he wasn't pretty sure the alert was a mistake.

My favorite reaction is probably Jim Carrey's. He was engrossed in work and missed the initial alert, but his assistant called to tell him they had 10 minutes to live.

He tried calling his daughter and some other family, wondering if there was any way to get off the island, and finally realizing everything was out of his control.

He explained all of this on an episode of The Tonight Show two years later (video here):

The front page headline in the Star-Advertiser newspaper the next day read, in giant type: OOPS! (And in smaller type: "'Wrong button' sends out false missile alert.")

Later, officials said that wasn't right; it was instead an employee who was absolute, 100 percent convinced that a missile was en route, and who sent the alert -- but was simply wrong.

I guess I've mentioned this theme a few times recently -- but isn't it funny that even being told you are going to die within a few minutes can turn out to be a gift?

At least that's what I take away from Carrey's account. Sometimes, I suppose you value things most when you're suddenly about to lose them.

As for everyone affected that day, I feel for them. It must have been hard.

Then again, after it was all over, they were still in Hawaii.

Did you see ...

• Firefighters scrambled Sunday to make further progress against wildfires that have destroyed thousands of homes and killed 24 people in the Los Angeles area as forecasters again warned of dangerous weather with the return of strong winds this week. At least 16 people were missing, and authorities said that number was expected to rise. (AP)
• How these suburban moms in Ukraine manage grief by training to down Russian drones. (NPR)
• Last year marked the first time in several years that the Army achieved its ambitious recruiting goals -- primarily due to an increase in female recruits, according to internal service data reviewed by Military.com. Nearly 10,000 women signed up for active duty in 2024, an 18% jump from the previous year, while male recruitment increased by just 8%, the data shows. (Military.com)
• Professional athletes’ homes are still getting broken into. Here’s how the FBI says the thieves operate. (CNN)
• Candidates vying to lead the Democratic National Committee have found a common enemy: the D.C. consultant. It’s a sign of the times for a party that burned through some $1.5 billion in the final months of the campaign, only to come up short against President-elect Donald Trump. As the party still searches for answers to its devastating losses in 2024, consultants became the punching bag. (Politico)
• Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles has been criticized for being out of the country when the wildfires broke out. Three years ago, she promised in an interview to cut back on her world travel and focus on the city. (NY Times)
• Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently called for rethinking recommended limits on drinking alcohol. Much of the country is already ahead of him on that. (Washington Post)