LINDBERGH FIELD, Calif. (KGTV) – A flight carrying travelers from Kahului, Maui arrived at 6:57 p.m. Saturday evening at Lindbergh Field, the first flight back to San Diego after a frightening alert was sent across Hawaii in error.
“For 10 minutes we were like, is this it or not?” recounted Barbara Robertson as she grabbed her bags from the Alaska Airways turnstile.
She was on vacation with her husband, daughter and grandchildren when they started receiving the alerts on their phone.
“We had to focus on calming the kids because they had never seen anything like that,” she said, mentioning one of her granddaughters burst out in tears.
Others were less concerned.
“Me and my buddy were probably like, it’s a hoax, we probably got hacked,” said Jarett Smith who lives in Carlsbad but was on his last day of vacation this morning in Maui.
Still, he and his friends went down into the underground garage of the hotel they were staying at.
“Most of the hotel was under there,” he said.
They finally got the news that the alert was sent in error by hotel staff.
“I never received the corrected text,” he said of the second message that was sent out by emergency officials in Hawaii.
