The head of Hawaii’s emergency management agency has resigned and a state employee who sent out an false alarm of an imminent missile attack has been fired, it was announced on Tuesday, after an inquiry into a mistake which caused statewide panic earlier this month.

According to a federal inquiry into the incident, the employee, a watch officer at the emergency management agency, believed the threat of a missile attack to be real as he had not heard a recorded message announcing it as an exercise. According to state officials, the watch officer had been a cause for concern to his colleagues for more than a decade and had twice before mistaken drills for real alerts. It was unclear how he had managed to remain in such a sensitive post for so long. As well as that employee’s dismissal and the resignation of the agency’s chief, Vern Miyagi, another official quit and a fourth has been suspended as a result of the incident. According to an official report, it took nearly 40 minutes to put out the all-clear, because the agency had not rehearsed what to do in the event of a false alarm and found lines jammed by anxious callers. Efforts by Hawaii’s governor to correct the mistake were delayed because he did not know his Twitter login.(Theguardian)…[+]