Even though Hawai‘i was unharmed by Tuesday’s tsunami scare, the state’s emergency response apparatus still has some kinks to work out.
As the Hawai‘i Emergency Management Agency attempted to warn residents to leave the state’s tsunami evacuation zones, the agency’s website quickly became overwhelmed, leaving maps of those zones temporarily unavailable during a critical early stage of the evacuation.
“We are still evaluating what technical complications were involved,” HIEMA spokesman Patrick Daley told Aloha State Daily by email Wednesday. “That crashing issue is a top priority that we have immediately set out to resolve and are currently working on.”
The crashes were caused by heavy traffic, Daley confirmed, although the exact number of site visitors during the emergency is still unknown.
Daley added that the website crashes do not appear to have been caused by foul play or by a distributed denial of service cyberattack, wherein malicious actors use proxies to flood a system with fake users and overwhelm it.
For the time being, Daley recommended that people who do not have a safety reason to visit the HIEMA website during an emergency refrain from doing so in order to not throttle traffic by other users.
Despite this, Daley said HIEMA considers its public communications efforts during the emergency to have been a success.
“Emergency alert systems, news media communications and social media communications worked well and quickly,” Daley said. “We also have good working relationships with our public information colleagues at the county emergency management agencies, and we utilized those lines of communication to gather and relay information for the public.”
Daley said the agency is conducting debriefings to gather further feedback about potential future improvements to HIEMA exercises, but the possible results of those debriefings are yet to be decided.
