A false warning of a missile threat in Hawaii sent White House aides scrambling Saturday, frantically phoning agencies to determine a response and triggering worries about their preparedness almost a year into the Trump administration.

President Donald Trump’s Cabinet has yet to test formal plans for how to respond to a domestic missile attack, according to a senior administration official. John Kelly, while serving as Secretary of Homeland Security through last July, planned to conduct the exercise. But he left his post to become White House chief of staff before it was conducted, and acting secretary Elaine Duke never carried it out.

“The U.S. government hasn’t tested these plans in 30 years,” said the senior administration official involved in the White House response. “All the fresh faces sitting around the table in the situation room have little idea what their roles would be in this scenario. The bottom line is that without a principals level exercise we shouldn’t have any confidence that the Cabinet would know what to do in an attack scenario.”

THIS WARNING SOUNDED THROUGHOUT THE STATE TODAY:

Not only that, but warnings buzzed on TVs.. radios.. the horrid screeching noise when an emergency alert sounds.. 

CNN reports,

Jocelyn Azbell had just woken up in her Maui hotel Saturday when she was hurried into the hotel’s basement to take shelter from an incoming ballistic missile.
“You’re thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, are we going to die? Is it really a missile (headed) our way, or is it just a test?’” the 24-year-old told CNN. “We really didn’t know.”
Minutes before, she’d received an ominous alert on her phone.
“BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

Azbell, her boyfriend and hundreds of other hotel guests were “herded like cows” into the basement by staff. “People are crying and people obviously were super scared,” she said.
For 20 minutes, Azbell said, they waited. Finally, they were told that the alert was a false alarm, and they were free to resume their day. Azbell said she was “super relieved.”
“Hawaii is beautiful,” she told CNN. “But it’s not where I want to die.”

Hawaii Emergency Management Agency Administrator Vern Miyagi said at a press conference with the governor Saturday afternoon that a single individual sent out the alert by mistake. The individual went so far as to click through a second message, intended as a safeguard, that asked whether the alert should go out.

But the blame should not fall on that man’s shoulders alone, Miyagi said. “I accept responsibility for this,” he said. “This is my team. We made a mistake. We are going to process this and study this to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”