Hawaii Calls For Evacuation Plan, Opens Fallout Shelters After North Korea Threat

Hawaii lawmakers have urgently ordered repairs to hundreds of Cold War-era nuclear fallout shelters and have begun restocking them with medical supplies, food and water.

As tensions with North Korea escalate, Hawaii residents – some old enough to remember the last time their state was in the nuclear crosshairs – are mobilizing to protect themselves from a threatened nuclear strike.

“They haven’t been updated since 1985,” Rep. Matt LoPresti, who serves as vice chair of that committee, told Hawaii News Now. “I was 11 years old when they were last updated. Many of the buildings that are on the fallout shelter list don’t exist anymore.”

While the war drums and weapons testing in Pyongyang are playing out on the other side of the world for most Americans, for Hawaiian residents the danger is much closer to home. Honolulu is roughly 4,600 miles from the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, within range of an intercontinental nuclear ballistic missile.

Fox News reports:

A long-range missile launched from North Korea could reach Hawaii or Alaska, said Dean Cheng, senior research fellow with the Asian Studies Center at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Hawaii is possibly a more desirable target, Cheng said, since the state has 11 military bases, including Pearl Harbor, and is the headquarters for the United States Pacific Command (USPACOM) at Camp Smith.

Cheng warned that since North Korea likely has an imprecise system, missiles launched at Pearl Harbor could actually hit downtown Honolulu or other areas of Oahu.

The impact of a missile hitting the island chain would be horrific, Cheng said. Burn cases would flood the hospitals. The state would need a plan to treat people out of the urban Honolulu center, he said, particularly if Honolulu were hit directly.

While preparing the state for such an attack will take time, Cheng said the state must begin.

“This is a long-term issue that is not going to go away,” Cheng said.

Should North Korea initiate an attack, the state would have just 20 minutes to prepare, said Toby Clairmont, executive officer of the department’s Hawaii Emergency Management Agency. He told lawmakers it could take seven years, however, to prepare the state for such an emergency and ensure adequate facilities for the state’s 1.42 million residents, including its substantial homeless population, as well as millions of visitors.

Because the vast majority of Hawaii’s food supply and other goods are brought in via Jones Act-approved cargo ships to Honolulu Harbor, lawmakers also called for the state to prepare alternative sites for food and supplies to be delivered should the harbor be destroyed.

LoPresti told Hawaii News Now he’s not trying to spread fear, but he wants the public to know the government is taking steps to protect them in the worst-case scenario.

The resolution, which passed the committee unanimously, requires further House and Senate approvals.

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