Some North Shore residents are recounting the horror they experienced in Hawaii on Saturday morning for 38 minutes, convinced they were going to die.
Central Lonsdale resident Nadia Van der Heyden was walking along an Oahu beach on the North Shore of the island with her mother, enjoying some early morning solitude, when the alarming text came through around 8 a.m. local time.
“BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL,” read the all-caps message blaring from Van der Heyden’s mother, Eliah Halpenny’s phone. That message was sent to every cellphone in the state.
Halpenny lives in Hawaii and is accustomed to getting official weather warning alerts on her cellphone. On Saturday morning it was a different story.
Mother and daughter frantically looked around them. They spotted municipal workers scrambling to reach for their radios. A bewildered woman came up to them on the beach and asked: “What do we do now?”
“We both said, my mom and I, there’s nothing we can do right now. If this is happening, it’s happening,” recalled Van der Heyden via phone from Hawaii on Monday afternoon.
Van der Heyden and her mother quickly came to accept their fate and were thankful they were together. Except, Van der Heyden desperately wanted to send what she thought was a final text message to her fiancé, Kevin Britton, back home in North Vancouver.
Van der Heyden, a full-time flight paramedic with B.C. Ambulance Service, would send Britton a loving text daily before takeoff, just in case something were to go wrong.
In North Vancouver on Saturday morning, while Van der Heyden was panicking about a potential missile headed towards her, her fiancé was sound asleep.
Meanwhile, a man approached Van der Heyden and her mother on the beach. The women asked if he had seen the alert. Calmly, Van de Heyden says he reassured them by saying: ‘Listen, I would know if something was going on. I’m a senior Navy officer and I don’t have an alert right now.’ ”
The Navy officer further abated their fears by telling them if there were such a threat, sirens stationed around town for tsunami warnings would be going off. Van der Heyden and her mother carried on and went to a farmers’ market at a local school, where people had taken cover inside.
A harrowing 38 minutes after the initial warning, a collective sigh of relief was heard around the Hawaiian Islands. False alarm, in essence, read the follow-up text from the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency.
When the adrenaline wore off and Van der Heyden had time to reflect on the near-death experience, she said it made her more appreciative of how safe she feels in Vancouver, and Canada in general.
British Properties resident Shawn Smith is certain he won’t be returning to Hawaii anytime soon, after Saturday’s ordeal in Oahu.
“I’m not going back as long as Trump is president,” said Smith, shortly after landing in Vancouver on Monday.
Smith, his wife and their four-year-old daughter, along with his elderly in-laws were in Waikiki Saturday morning, enjoying the end of a two-week vacation in paradise when the ominous text came through.
The false alert was sent by a Hawaii Emergency Management Agency employee who pushed the wrong button during a shift change, according to news reports.
When the text was sent, Smith was on his way to breakfast downstairs at his hotel. Riding in the elevator, Smith missed it at first.
His father-in-law, who was a couple minutes ahead of him, said: “Lucky for you, the place just cleared out – there’s all kinds of tables.”
Smith sat down and casually checked his phone. “The blood drained out of my face,” he said.
That fear was short-lived, adds a social-media savvy Smith, who immediately pulled up CNN’s feed on his phone and saw that the missile threat was a false alarm.
“But what’s odd is that there was very little concern amongst most of the people that were in the restaurant still,” recalled Smith.
A friend in Waikiki reported to Smith that his entire hotel was evacuated.
“But our hotel, nothing,” said Smith.
Seven or eight minutes later Smith heard what he described as an odd sound reverberating in the dining room.
“And it was the sound of every single cellphone in that restaurant getting the second alert that it was a false alarm at the same time. It was the weirdest sound I ever heard in my life. At that point we were able to exhale,” said Smith.
Smith and his family had been seriously talking about laying down winter roots in Hawaii, but not anymore.
“It’s real, right? When you get that (text message) you realize: 'Holy smokes, yeah it’s a mistake, but it’s (a nuclear war) now within the realm of reality,' ” said Smith.
When Deep Cove resident Colette Baber saw the emergency text on Saturday morning in Hawaii it brought her back to her childhood in Ontario. Baber lived across the street from a nuclear power plant, on the shore of Lake Erie.
While Baber went through a number of nuclear emergency drills as a child, nothing could prepare her for what happened on Saturday.
The sun warming her face, Baber was having breakfast on the patio of her condo in the Makaha Valley, just west of Honolulu, when she received the missile alert on her iPhone. Her 83-year-old mother was with her.
“Your initial reaction is, ‘This can’t be real,’ ” said Baber, who was still in Hawaii on Monday. “And then in the same moment, your brain thinks: ‘This is absolutely plausible in the day and age we live in.’ ”
Baber became emotional recounting the horror of that half an hour when she thought the end was coming. She said she was paralyzed with fear.
“I tried to call my husband because I thought I would never see him again,” said Baber, who was in Hawaii for a soccer tournament.
There was a long delay in her husband Craig receiving the message because he was out of cellphone range, hiking on Mount Seymour with the couple’s dogs.
Over in Hawaii, Baber shut all the doors and windows – thinking back to those childhood drills. She and her mother barricaded themselves inside the condo the best they could. They then sat on the couch and waited.
“You think you’re going to die,” said Baber. “Without a doubt. I mean I was terrified. (It was) 38 minutes of ‘I’m going to die.'”
