Danielle Reay Hindel is a 2002 graduate from West Orange Stark, currently living in Honolulu HI on Hickam AFB. She was in Hawaii Saturday, January 13 when the state received a missile threat alert. She shares her story with KOGT readers.
Growing up in Southeast Texas on the Gulf Coast, I’ve lived thru my fair share of natural disaster warnings. Hurricane warnings give you a few days worth of a heads up to get out of dodge. Grab your family, get a few prized possessions and get on the road. You may or may not have a house to come back to but your chances of survival are fairly high. I lived in Biloxi, MS during Hurricane Katrina. I thought that was the worst.
As an adult, I’ve lived all over. But I think the scariest to this point was Omaha, NE. Tornadoes are an entirely different monster. I was lucky enough to live there for nearly two years until hearing those sirens. We were living in a hotel preparing for our next move. We watched the news and we knew the tornado would miss us. But hearing the sirens and knowing it was just a few miles North of us was still scary enough to make us all hug each other a little tighter that night. Even tornadoes are survivable. I thought that was the worst.
January 13th started like most of my normal Saturday mornings. I was happily sleeping in past my normal 5:30 AM alarm. Then I heard the dreaded noise. The buzz of the alarm in the bathroom. My husband decided to put one in the bathroom to force himself to get up for the gym every day. I slowly rolled over and nudged my husband awake. “Whyyy on Earth is your alarm going off at 7 AM on a Saturdayyyyy?” I asked him. He slowly crawled out of bed, shut the alarm off, then proceeded to snuggle back up under the warm comforter with me. “I was going to go to the gym, but I think extra cuddles sound better,” he said.
For the next hour, it was happiness. The boy’s were still snoring away. The dog was under the covers still snoozing. Our daughter was at a sleepover at a friend’s across the courtyard. The house was so peaceful and calm.
Then it happened.
8:07AM
I remember the first time my emergency alarm went off. It scared the bejeezus out of me because I had my phone on silent and suddenly it was louder than I’d ever heard it before. It was raining in Florida and we were under a flash flood warning.
So this time when it went off, I didn’t panic. I just figured it was maybe an Amber Alert or something. From what I could see out the blinds, the sky was the normal perfect clear blue. I doubted it would be a weather warning.
“EMERGENCY ALERT: BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”
From that moment forward, everything changed.
I remember throwing the blankets off and jumping out of the bed. I threw my phone at Dustin to read the message while I ran downstairs. I wanted to get the TV on to see if the alert was on yet. I wanted to open the sliding doors so I could hear if the alarm sirens were going off yet. We’d been briefed and briefed and briefed some more. I knew. If a missile was headed our way, by the time we were warned then we had 12-15 minutes. That’s it. 12-15 minutes to gather your family, attempt to find shelter, and hope and pray to whatever God you believe in that it is over quickly, painlessly, and no one suffers.
Nothing was on the news. No sirens were blaring. But the message said THIS IS NOT A DRILL. It must be real.
My neighbor is a fantastic guy. When my husband has to leave, he is the one that stands up and ensures that the kids and I are safe and protected while home. He is Special Forces and has seen some pretty terrible stuff in his time. We take everything he says seriously. I remember as my husband got downstairs to see the TV with me, we both looked outside and we saw our neighbor running across the courtyard with his daughter from the same neighbor’s house where our daughter had also had a sleepover. If HE was running, then WE were running. My husband immediately took off across the yard to get our daughter. No shoes. No shirt. Just the shorts he slept in. If this was happening, we were at least going to be together as a family.
I kept scrolling thru channels but hadn’t seen anything. Eventually the emergency alert banner started to scroll across the bottom of the screen of the local channels. The same exact verbiage as the alert on my phone.
My husband got back to the house within what felt like seconds with our daughter. She is 8 years old. She was wrapped in a blanket and crying. “Please just tell me what’s happening. I’m so scared. Please just tell me. Am I going to get hurt?” she kept repeating over and over again. We needed to get to a room as central in our home as we could. One with no windows and as little ventilation to the outside as possible. So we brought her to the laundry room and sat her down. Dustin ran upstairs to get the boys and I gathered as many blankets from the living room as I could. My two boys, ages 11 and 13, came stumbling down the stairs like zombies. Thankfully we’ve made it clear enough to them that when we say, “Get up and get down to the laundry room NOW!” they react to the hesitance without question. That’s mostly thanks to tornado drills.
It didn’t take them long before they knew it wasn’t a weather issue. After we got the dog in, the door shut and we were all in the laundry room, we knew we couldn’t NOT tell them what was going on. I read the alert message out loud. My daughter looked at me puzzled and asked who would want to do such a thing. My middle son was quick to answer her. “If anyone, it’s North Korea. But don’t worry. We have stuff that can blow the missiles down before they get here.” He had such amazing faith in our military and their ability to protect us.
I took screenshots of the alert and sent them to my mom and dad. I texted them to let them know we were in the laundry room and doing ok. I thought about making phone calls to tell my family on the mainland that I loved them. But I looked at my kids and I didn’t want to instill any more fear in them than they were already feeling. If it was going to happen, it was going to happen but at least we were all together.
We kept checking local Facebook pages. EVERYONE was freaking out. My daughter wasn’t quite as hysterical, but she was still asking a lot of questions. Mostly if our military WAS able to intercept it, if it meant that we were going to be going to war again. She sat in her Daddy’s lap and cried. And cried. And cried.
To help relieve her tears, I thought to myself, “If I’m going to die today, do I want to die cowering in fear? Or do I want to go out knowing I’m with those who mean the most to me and that we were happy?” So I did what any millennial mom would do in 2018 while hidden away from the threat of a nuclear bomb in her laundry room: I opened up my YouTube app and started playing funny videos. I sat next to my husband with my dog in my lap and my kids cuddled around us and we watched auctioneers do auctions dubbed over rap music, we watched “Try Not To Laugh” videos of people doing silly stuff and ending up hurt, and we watched cute animal videos. Instead of tears and fear, we were going to go out laughing and smiling.
About 25 minutes into the ordeal, we got the first message from a friend back on the mainland that it was looking like a false alarm. We still hadn’t heard any sirens. The college basketball games were still on the local channels. But I wasn’t chancing it. Until I received another alert that it was all clear, we were staying in that closet. Even if it meant forever.
Finally, at 8:45 AM it came.
“EMERGENCY ALERT: There is no missile threat or danger to the State of Hawaii. Repeat. False Alarm.”
I still can’t put into words the feeling that came over me. Relief. Anger. Happiness. Sadness. Jubilation. But overwhelmingly so, realization.
Sure we live in paradise. Hawai’i has perfect weather basically all year. There is a rainbow nearly every day. We see dolphins. We eat kalua pork. We have mountains. We have mermaid coves. But we also have an extremely real, incredibly scary nuclear threat always hanging over our heads. Saturday made that threat real. You can watch it on the news, you can hear about it on the radio, but until you are sitting in a laundry room wondering if you’ll even feel it when it happens…you don’t realize the true threat.
I’ve waited a few days before writing anything because I wanted to make sure I was writing with a clear mind. I don’t harbor any anger towards anyone. We’re humans and NO human is perfect. I forgive them. As a person who suffers from Generalized Anxiety Disorder, my anxiety has been triggered quite immensely. I’m feeling the same separation anxiety with sending my teenage son to 8th grade that I felt the first few days of dropping him off at daycare as an infant. I don’t want us too far apart. I want everyone close to me. Every time my phone beeps I flinch.
For 38 minutes I thought I was going to die. So now, like the saying goes: I am going to live every day like I might die tomorrow because for all I know, I might.
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