Military aims for missile defense radar in Hawaii
HONOLULU — The U.S. military wants to install missile defense radar in Hawaii to identify any ballistic missiles fired from North Korea or elsewhere, officials said Tuesday.
The $1 billion system would spot warheads on missiles headed for Hawaii and other U.S. states, and provide that information to ground-based interceptors in Alaska designed to shoot them down. It would be able to distinguish warheads from decoys designed to trick missile defense systems.
The radar would help give the Alaska missiles “better eyes,” said Hawaii Democratic U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz.
So far, lawmakers have appropriated $61 million for planning but not funds for construction.
The agency is studying two possible locations for the radar, both of which are on Oahu’s North Shore. It’s collecting public comment through July 16.
Network outage disrupts Honolulu services
HONOLULU — A moved wire at a Honolulu municipal building caused a network outage, halting services at satellite city halls and state driver’s licensing centers, officials said.
The city’s computer network went down Monday morning, disrupting all city operations that rely on the network. Most of the city systems were restored by the end of the work day.
The city lost all network equipment, telephone, storage, servers and mainframe systems shortly after 9 a.m., officials said. The city hosts vehicle licensing and registration network services for three other Hawaii counties, resulting in a multi-island outage for those services.
The city’s 911 system and other emergency services were not affected.
Most of the city systems were back online by about 4:30 p.m. Monday.
The city attributed the outage to human error. Vendors were upgrading a fire suppressant system in the basement of the Frank F. Fasi Municipal Building when they “pulled or loosened a wire,” said the city’s Department of Information Technology Director Mark Wong.
The moved wire signaled the power systems to shut down and tripped the backup systems, which failed as the battery power ran out.
Building generators would have powered the system if there was a power outage, but the batteries were drained because city power was still working, Wong said.