I’ve worked in and managed the same call center for almost 13 years. It’s not military. But it is for a network of hospitals. That’s why I have to believe that the command center that issued the warning minimally has the same amount of failsafes in place, if not a ton more. When we send out an emergency code page:
- The operator has to click a button that says they verified the information.
- The operator has to click another another button to initiate the page.
- Finally, the message that will be paged appears on screen and the operator has to click a button to verify that this is the message they want to send. It’s an OK or CANCEL option.
- The page goes to a group that includes a pager in the call center and its manager’s cell phone (me). We know what went out to the group.
I know it works this way because I dropped off the face of the earth for the last 6 months in order to build this system.
So. The human error I can see happening in Hawaii is someone hitting OK instead of CANCEL. This is not good. But it happens. It why there are drills.
It’s irritating to see people on tv talk about there being the need for more buttons. The buttons are there. We have the buttons. There are merry bushels of buttons. You want to be safe, but you want to be able to send an alert out as quickly as possible. There is not a lot of room for error with ballistic middle strikes.
What scares me is the 38 minute gap in the error and the all clear. When my call center makes a mistake, we are flooded by calls pointing it out. I have to believe this command center was flooded with confirmation calls. I’m sure part of the 38 minute gap was due to an investigation. That’s likely where the shift change played a role. Whoever sent the page may have just left and was not readily available. But something should have been on a shift report. Even if the person thought they clicked CANCEL, a good faith catch should have been listed in a risk assessment line item.
A 38 minute investigative period is bad. There needs to be a better process for monitoring such messages when they go out. That way, if there is an error, it can be corrected in a third of that time or less.
I understand a lot of these procedures haven’t been changed since the late 80s. Everyone keeps saying that on TV. It appears it’s time for a change. Not to the technology. Not to the personnel. To the failsafes we have in place to make sure everything runs with speedy accuracy. That includes error management.