Steemit
This past week, we learned that the man responsible for the bogus Hawaii missile alert last month had kept his job for a decade, even though he had a history of performance problems and had been “a source of concern,” according to a Federal Communications Commission report. His fellow employees had expressed discomfort about his work, and the FCC said that he was “unable to comprehend the situation at hand and has confused real life events and drills on at least two separate occasions.” Although the emergency management worker, who remains unnamed, was a union member, he could’ve been fired at will. “Why, then,” Gizmodo understandably wondered, “was the employee in a position to send a false missile alarm to a couple of million people?”
As we say in the islands, e komo mai (welcome) to Hawaii.
I worked as a Hawaii state employee for a short time, serving as spokesman for a division of the Hawaii Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, and then spent more than seven years dealing with the government as a journalist. Anyone who knows how Honolulu functions can’t have been surprised by the FCC’s revelations. The sad part is that the worker’s ineptitude and the chaos he caused have exposed to the world old, ugly tropes about Hawaiian accountability and competence that residents would love nothing more than to shake off. ...
Posts
