How Hawaiians Reacted to Belief They Were About to Die

On January 13, 2018, people in Hawaii got the scare of their life when they received an emergency warning on their phone saying a missile would be hitting the islands imminently. Sean Flynn from GQ spoke to people about how they reacted when they thought they only had moments to live.

Vern Miyagi, the administrator of the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, received the alert on both his personal and work phones. As a retired major general who spent his last post in the Pacific Command, Miyagi could differentiate easily between realistic threats and improbable ones. But he wasn’t sure what was happening, so he sent his wife and grandchildren to the safest part of the house and told them to “go ahead and hunker down anyway.” Meanwhile, when Chris Luan got the alert she told her children to fill jugs with water and put pillows and blankets in the pantry — which had no windows and was well stocked enough that they could survive for a week if the blast didn’t kill them. Kathleen French’s first thought after receiving the alert at the gym was that she was going to die.

Flynn writes that “every minute believing a nuclear missile is inbound is a minute spent preparing to die or to desperately survive.” And though there is not panic, there is mostly “slow-motion shock.” No one knows how they will respond to the news that they will most likely die within minutes until they live through that experience.