diff --git a/CHANGES.txt b/CHANGES.txt
index 34ff93981d9..5734ee7802d 100644
--- a/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/CHANGES.txt
@@ -475,6 +475,7 @@ Release 0.92.0 - Unreleased
    HBASE-5088  A concurrency issue on SoftValueSortedMap (Jieshan Bean and Lars H)
    HBASE-5152  Region is on service before completing initialization when doing rollback of split,
                it will affect read correctness (Chunhui)
+   HBASE-5137  MasterFileSystem.splitLog() should abort even if waitOnSafeMode() throws IOException(Ted)
 
   TESTS
    HBASE-4450  test for number of blocks read: to serve as baseline for expected
diff --git a/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/master/MasterFileSystem.java b/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/master/MasterFileSystem.java
index 548a5be9668..aff8895e917 100644
--- a/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/master/MasterFileSystem.java
+++ b/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/master/MasterFileSystem.java
@@ -227,9 +227,10 @@ public class MasterFileSystem {
               "hbase.hlog.split.failure.retry.interval", 30 * 1000));
           }
         } catch (InterruptedException e) {
-          LOG.warn("Interrupted, returning w/o splitting at startup");
+          LOG.warn("Interrupted, aborting since cannot return w/o splitting");
           Thread.currentThread().interrupt();
           retrySplitting = false;
+          Runtime.getRuntime().halt(1);
         }
       }
     } while (retrySplitting);