The media outside Hawaii really brushed it under the rug very quickly, which I've seen a lot of people claim was suspicious.

Think about it from a psy-op perspective. If you're trying to wake-up a nation and trigger a 'great awakening' and you are going to do something as radical as to create a movie where there is a literal the-ski-is-falling/'precepice' moment being shown to the public, one where the EBS plays a DEFCON1 scenario, you're not just going to do that without conducting a localized simulation (like a localized ebs defcon moment in Hawaii) to gauge the public's reaction, see what sort of chaos arises so they can better plan for the real thing.

Just a theory that popped-into my head :)