Tarpon Springs couple remained calm during Hawaii missile scare

TARPON SPRINGS (FOX 13) - It was a serene Hawaii vacation for the Carson family, until the final day. 

Sue Carson and her daughter Katie were in line to order breakfast when they received an alert on their phones: "Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill."

Everyone ran.

"People were in shock. Like, is this real?" Sue explained. "It said, 'Not a drill,' on your message. To me, that's what scared me the most, because it said, 'This is not a drill.'"

Sue and her daughter ran back to their hotel to meet up with their husbands. 

They searched through social media, looking for answers and quickly found reports of a false alarm.

But that information hadn't reached the local news yet. When they called the hotel for a plan, all they got was a busy tone. 

Meanwhile, emergency sirens called for people to seek shelter. People ran for their lives. 

Dr. Thomas Carson, of the Carson Family Care Center in Tarpon Springs, said the family managed to remain calm.

"Admittedly that's my profession," said Dr. Carson. "You deal with any number of crises, and you always want to stay calm during a crisis." 

There was no reason to think it wasn't real, especially with North Korea refusing to back down from missile testing. 

"Of course that was one of the first thoughts was that 'Oh crap!' he finally lost his temper, pushed the button," said Dr. Carson. 

It would take just 20 minutes for one of Kim Jong Un's North Korean missiles to reach Hawaii. 

38 minutes after the initial alert came out, the Carsons, along with the over one million people on the Hawaiian islands let out a collective sigh of relief:  

"I was shocked that someone could push one button and have it become chaos," said Sue. 

Earlier this week, Hawaii's governor said he knew it was a false alarm just two minutes after the alert was sent out. He said he couldn't correct it faster because he forgot the password to his Twitter account.