After threats from North Korea, residents of Guam got a lot more tense just after midnight local time on Tuesday, when a pair of radio stations on the island broadcast an emergency civil danger warning, triggering panic throughout the Pacific US territory.
But there was nothing sort of an emergency when two radio stations conducted an unscheduled test of the Emergency Alert Broadcast System.
The warning lasted only 15 minutes and officials later stressed that a real emergency message would describe the type of threat.
Guam is home to a US military base that includes a submarine squadron, an airbase and a coastguard group and is armed with the U.S. Army's missile defense system known as Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, the same system recently installed in South Korea.
Guam Homeland Security/Office of Civil Defense said the stations, KTWG and KSTO, had simply made a mistake.
Civil danger broadcasts are rare and are used to warn civilians of an imminent threat, such as a military strike or terrorist attack.
"The unauthorized test was NOT connected to any emergency, threat or warning," the agency said in a statement. "GHS/OCD has worked with (the stations) to ensure the human error will not occur again. There is no scheduled test of the EAS or All Hazards Alert Warning System sirens today," CNN reported.
North Korea further threatened to attack Guam and other US territories in the Pacific region, with a government spokesman saying a strike plan was ready "to put into practise in a multi-current and consecutive way any moment" on Kim's instruction.
After the two ICBM tests conducted with the orders of Kim Jong-Un, the United States and North Korea have been engaged in increasingly threatening rhetoric since last Tuesday when US bombers flew over the Korean peninsula, and US President Donald Trump threatened Pyongyang with "fire and fury".
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