The Jan. 13 false emergency threat alert, and the response to it, has undermined the public’s trust in our state government.

At a time when we face heightened tensions around the world, and particularly with North Korea, the people of Hawaii should be able to depend on the state government to provide timely, accurate information in situations like these.

It’s why I have called for a thorough, transparent investigation to provide a full accounting of the human and system failures that occurred. However, it is not enough to only identify failures. We need to take specific and corrective actions to prevent this error or something similar from ever happening again.

A single operator should not have been able to trigger the false alert. Although the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency (HI-EMA) discovered the error quickly, it should not have taken 38 minutes to inform the public. We need to clearly understand the circumstances that led up to the error and any potential issues that may have contributed to it.

Concurrently, this system failure occurred despite HI-EMA’s ongoing preparations for a potential missile attack. And once the alert was triggered, most of the public didn’t know what to do, including restarting a siren attack- warning signal.

At a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing last week, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen assured me that the state did not require permission from Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to issue a cancellation. Yet, HI-EMA officials believed they needed approval from FEMA to issue a correction. This confusion points to a need to clarify agency responsibilities in crisis situations.

Gov. David Ige took responsibility for the incident in a speech Monday. As the chief executive of our state, the governor should also identify a path forward to restore public trust in our government.

While the governor bears the burden of investigating and rectifying this situation, federal agencies, including the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through FEMA, have a clear role to play to make sure the emergency alert systems are working properly in every state and territory.

Nielsen made a commitment to work with me to strengthen federal-state cooperation on emergency alerts, assess potential system failures, and improve overall readiness in Hawaii and across the country. The FCC is also conducting an investigation into what happened.

The entire nation will benefit if, as a result of this false alert in Hawaii, federal agencies work with states to close gaps in training and communication, institute best practices, and ensure states and local governments have the appropriate resources to prevent this from happening again.

This false alert also clarified the importance of strong coordination between state government and our military. On Jan. 13, I spoke with Adm. Harry Harris of Pacific Command about ways to strengthen this coordination, particularly during a period of heightened tensions with North Korea.

The fact that Hawaii families assumed that the false alert meant an attack from North Korea speaks to the broader concern about the threat North Korea poses to our state and the rest of the country.

The president, instead of continuing his dangerous and counterproductive rhetorical tit for tat with Kim Jong Un, should be supporting Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s diplomatic efforts to marshal the support of our allies to diffuse tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

I conveyed this message directly to Secretary of Defense James Mattis during a call recently after he returned from an important multilateral meeting with allies including Japan and South Korea to discuss the North Korean threat. Even minor events could trigger miscalculations with devastating consequences for all of us.

The state government needs to regain the trust of the people of Hawaii. We need to get to the bottom of what happened and make sure this mistake never happens again.