Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra and welcome to the bay. Local news to keep you rooted. Back in September when wildfire smoke hovered over the Bay Area, emergency alerts started popping up on people’s phones. Air quality reached hazardous levels for those with respiratory diseases, the alerts read. But for the thousands of Bay Area residents who speak a language other than English at home, it would take days for them to receive the same alert in their native language, if at all.
Alma Bowen: You know, if you’re not hearing that you’re evacuating because it’s misunderstood or they’re telling you the wrong area, you might not get out in time.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: According to reporting from El Timpano, more than a quarter of non-English speakers living in the Bay Area don’t have access to emergency alerts in their native language. Today, we’re going to dig into this language gap in local emergency alert systems here in the bay and how one county has been working to change that. Jasmine, I wonder if you can maybe just start by explaining when a disaster strikes, do we have systems set up to let everyone know when stuff hits the fan?
Jasmine Aguilera: The short answer, unfortunately, is for a lot of people, no.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Jasmine Aguilera is a senior reporter for El Timpano.
Jasmine Aguilera: For the most part, not everybody will receive timely and accurate information and in their own language or analysis adulting. But I found that of California’s 58 counties, only 21 offer alerts in a language other than English. We’re also giving these counties the benefit of the doubt because a lot of times we cannot actually test whether or not these alerts will send out until we can actually test their systems. So we took a look at the nine Bay Area counties here and determined that 3.2 million people here speak a language other than English at home. And because Alameda County and Solano counties do not offer alerts in a language other than English, we’re talking about at least 27% of the population that doesn’t have access to emergency alerts in their native language.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So those two counties that you mentioned, Alameda and Solano County, are the only counties in the Bay Area who aren’t offering alerts in any language other than English.
Jasmine Aguilera: Exactly. And I mean, two out of the nine. You know, that’s not bad. But these are counties with gigantic non-English populations. So it is a significant part of the population.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, Jasmine, I wonder if we can step back a little bit and explain for us how these emergency alert systems work exactly and why is this happening? Where is the breakdown?
Jasmine Aguilera: So even signing up for alerts we found can be really challenging for non-English speakers. And we cover the Latino and Mayan immigrant communities here in the Bay Area. And we’ve done several surveys that show that often times, especially older immigrants do not have computers at home, do not have Internet at home. They may not even have an email address. And for the vast majority of California counties, you have to opt into the program. You have to actually go to the county website, put in your information.
Jasmine Aguilera: And oftentimes these websites are asking for first name, last name, email addresses and home addresses. It is pretty obvious that if you’re an undocumented person, older person not familiar with technology, you may feel nervous about, you know, giving the government your personal address or you may not even understand what’s going on on this Web page. Many of the Web pages technically may offer a translated version if you select a widget at the top of the page to change your language preferences.
Jasmine Aguilera: But if you’re not a tech savvy person, you may not know that at the top of the page where it says language, that means Ijeoma that you can change the language there. We found very few counties where you can text in to opt in, and even those it’s very hit or miss, whether or not even if you’re opting in, in your native language, whether you’ll actually receive ultimately those alerts in your native language.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Do we know anything about why it is an opt in system when any one of us would want to know what’s happening as soon as it happens, if there’s an emergency in our community?
Jasmine Aguilera: It sounds like a simple fix would be to create one gigantic system where people can opt in and then those that are at a federal level that exists. But we’re talking about a state that is gigantic, very complicated, very ecologically diverse. Disasters will vary depending on what part of the state you’re in. And so purposefully, the state of California has tried to make sure that each county is empowered to design their own individual opt in programs because they want to make sure that officials can handle whatever disaster is going on on a very localized level. But that means there isn’t one simple solution if you’re trying to make sure that disaster responses can be very, very localized.
Jasmine Aguilera: And we found that, you know, sometimes there are the best intentions, just a lack of resources or other times they really just isn’t enough willpower to try to, you know, create a system. Maybe the population of non-English speakers is small enough that it’s just not top of mind for people when they’ve got so many other things that are on their plate. And then we found other counties that are in the middle of actually trying as hard as possible to create a robust system. But at least at the time of reporting, we found, you know, the vast majority of California’s programs are not up to the task right now.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Coming up, we’ll talk about one Bay Area county that has put in the work to reach more residents in an emergency. Stay with us.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Your reporting kind of zoomed into one Bay Area county in particular that was really trying to get its act together specifically for the Spanish speaking population. Can you tell me about that and what what your reporting found?
Jasmine Aguilera: We didn’t have to look very far. We went over to Sonoma County and saw the steps that they’ve taken. Basically, I mean, officials, they themselves will say it’s because they’ve faced disaster after disaster after disaster essentially since 2017. And they realized since the Tubbs fire of 2017 that their communications were just lacking.
Alma Bowen: In 2017 when that fire hit. None of this was in place.
Jasmine Aguilera: We spoke to Alma Bowen, who is the founder and executive director of Nuestra Comunidad, a nonprofit organization that focuses on disaster preparedness and reaching specifically Spanish speaking communities.
Alma Bowen: And there was no organization. And so there were either duplication of services or there were needs that were not met because we simply didn’t know who could fill those needs.
Jasmine Aguilera: Ultimately, what they did is they revamped their Sonoma County coed community organizations active in disaster. That’s what the acronym for which was a coalition of nonprofit organizations that are all each doing their own individual work for the community.
Alma Bowen: As soon as they’re going to activate their EOC or emergency operations center. That call gets put to code. From that moment on, until the emergency sovereign shuts down, one of us is present in that room. The expectation is that the message is go out simultaneously and at least English and Spanish, because those are our highest populations. And then year round, that’s part of the conversations we’re always having with them.
Jasmine Aguilera: And also giving them a seat at the county government table so that everybody is in communication. Everybody knows what to do whenever a disaster strikes.
Alma Bowen: And so what’s happened is over time, we have become true partners now with the county.
Jasmine Aguilera: And then on top of that, they’ve also created essentially this bank of alerts prepared in advance in English and Spanish at the county level. So we’re talking about thousands of clips of audio in English and Spanish that are localized per Sonoma County zone.
Jasmine Aguilera: So if there’s, you know, flooding in zone four, you know, they’ve got a clip already prerecorded so that they can just send that out in a push of a button rather than, you know, trying to gather all of the people and find a translator and make sure, you know, that that it’s all recorded before sending. It saves potentially, you know, minutes or hours. It could save lives.
Alma Bowen: You know, if you’re not hearing that, you’re evacuating because it’s misunderstood or they’re telling you the wrong area, you might not get out in time.
Jasmine Aguilera: There’s still a lot of people who will be left out even now. But, you know, as far as we could see, they are the ones who have really taken on the task and have have tried to do as much as possible since 2017.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I’m wondering, Jasmine, why you think Sonoma County was able to get its act together in this where I guess address this and why haven’t other counties been able to do that?
Jasmine Aguilera: Alma Bowen said it best that Sonoma County really had no choice.
Alma Bowen: Had we not had Kincade Walbridge Glass, you know, all those different fires right out like almost on the heel of each other? I don’t know. It’s like every time a fire hit, it just kept smacking him into reality. You have to do something.
Jasmine Aguilera: She also said it’s important for these counties in California to realize that they have time right now. They can right now in this moment, try to revamp their programs, because when a disaster hits, that’s you know, that’s not the moment that you need to be trying to fix your system.
Alma Bowen: My words of advice is, don’t wait.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, how do we do that then, Jasmyne? How do we get other counties on the same level as Sonoma County here.
Jasmine Aguilera: In the state of California themselves will tell you that every county has to own this. Lisa California, for example, it is a government level organization that will aid counties in revamping their system, that will provide, you know, language already pre written and resources already established. But each county needs to be able to own. They don’t want to step on toes is what they told me. It’s a matter of willpower and it’s a matter of resources.
Jasmine Aguilera: There is not a one size fits all that will solve the problem for each each county. We did find examples of other counties who are making efforts. They are taking steps at the moment. It’s a it’s a process. It takes time. I even in Sonoma County, it’s taken years. It’s complicated, but it’s also not complicated in a weird way. You know, there are solutions, there are models. Sonoma County is an example.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: It’s doable. It’s doable. What is your biggest takeaway from this story?
Jasmine Aguilera: My biggest takeaway really has been how essential language access is. It’s something that, you know, as an English speaker, as a bilingual speaker, but primarily English speaker. I realize the enormous privilege now that I have whenever I receive an alert about, you know, just a traffic jam in San Francisco that I can avoid, other people will probably get stuck up in that jam. Imagine, you know, just kind of the snowball effect there. If you get stuck in that traffic jam, you’re late for work.
Jasmine Aguilera: And for me, maybe being late for work isn’t so much a significant thing. But for someone else who is an hourly worker, that’s significant. It’s not even just emergencies. Sometimes it’s as simple as just getting through your daily life. Making things more accessible through language, I think is kind of the least we can do in California. You know, the state with the largest immigrant population in the country.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, Jasmine, thank you so much for sharing your reporting with us and joining us on the show. I really appreciate it.
Jasmine Aguilera: Thank you so much, Ericka. Really appreciate it.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: That was Jasmine Aguilera, a senior reporter for El Timpano. We’ll leave you a link to Jasmine’s full story in El Timpano. In our show notes, this 30 minute conversation with Jasmine was cut down and edited by senior editor Alan Montecillo. Maria Esquinca is our producer, she scored this episode and added all the tape, additional production support from me.
