“It’s flooding here. The water is up to the first step,” a cellphone-garbled voice told Adriana Menéndez in Spanish.
¿Qué debemos hacer? Asked the mother in a family of seven. “What should we do?”
Hurricane Debby hit Florida at 7 a.m. on Aug. 5th.
By 9 a.m., torrential rains flooded the land around the family’s mobile home in Suwannee County.
At 2 p.m. “I received a second call from them, obviously way more scared,” Menéndez said. Water now reached the second step.
¿Qué debemos hacer? They asked again. “What should we do?”
Menéndez heard the question dozens of times over the course of the storm as she worked a Spanish-language resource line managed by the Rural Women’s Health Project.
Callers from north central Florida told her of flooded roads, power outages and stalled cars. They asked for guidance, information and help. Menéndez received 35 to 40 Spanish-language calls during the storm and another 150 to 160 over the month that followed.
Florida is a linguistic treasure trove. Floridians speak more than 130 different languages at home, led by English, Spanish and Haitian Creole. But a WUFT by-county analysis reveals inconsistency in emergency communications that leads to confusion. Most rural, agricultural counties in north central Florida lack in-house interpreters and multilingual social media outreach. More than a third don’t have bilingual staff or call-in language lines.
Even among those that offer such services, mistrust and other barriers mean many residents avoid government officials and seek information from churches, friends and advocacy groups during disasters. The Suwannee County Emergency Operations Center, like seven in the region, staffed bilingual personnel during Debby and offered professional interpreters by phone. Yet Chris Volz, assistant director of emergency management, said his office didn’t receive any Spanish-language calls.
Florida law requires consistent language assistance for elections, court cases and medical appointments. But state law does not address multilingual emergency communications despite Florida’s vulnerability to hurricanes. Counties are left to create their own multilingual communications strategies. Speakers of Spanish, Mayan languages and others are left unsure where to turn.
The problem is not confined to small counties. Palm Beach County leads the state in agricultural production and more than a third of the population – nearly 500,000 people – don’t speak English at home. While the county offers 32-page hurricane-planning guides in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole, graphics including evacuation maps are in English with captions advising to copy and paste text into Google Translate to read them.
Florida’s Division of Emergency Management lists language in its criteria for assessing county-level plans. The state’s Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan, intended to unify state and local response, mentions language only once in its 232 pages. “The ability to communicate with non-English speaking persons may pose a challenge during disasters,” the 2024 edition reads.
But neither document, nor state law, guides counties to overcome that challenge.
A hidden need
More than 126,000 farmworkers live in Florida, according to the National Center for Farmworker Health. They’re a foundation of the state’s $9 billion agricultural economy and a population particularly vulnerable to disasters.
Guatemalan immigrants from Huehuetenango comprise a significant subset. They’re driven out of their home region by climate change-fueled droughts and fungal diseases that threaten economically important coffee production.
A majority of Huehuetenango’s population identifies as indigenous Maya. They speak any of 22 Mayan languages, which are not mutually intelligible with each other or with Spanish; it’s a misconception that Carmen Cadena frequently corrects.
“They have nothing to do with each other, they are not a ‘sub language’ or a dialect or a branch… nothing to do,” said Cadena in Spanish, founder of the Florida-based company, Maya Interpreters.
Originally from Huehuetenango, Cadena and her mother immigrated in 1983 and worked various agricultural jobs throughout the United States. They settled in LaBelle, seat of agricultural Hendry County in southwest Florida, in 1990.
Cadena learned English in school and quickly became the go-to interpreter for her community. Founding Maya Interpreters felt natural. Most translation companies rarely offer Cadena’s native Akateko or later-acquired Q’anjob’al.
“They don’t see them as needed,” she said. “But I know that they’re needed because I’ve been interpreting for my Mom since I was eight years old.”
In 2015, the last time the Census Bureau published detailed state-level language data, fewer than 900 Floridians reported speaking a Mayan language at home.
But, between historic undercounts of Latino populations and recent increases in Guatemalan immigration, “nobody knows how many people of Mayan background are in Florida,” Allan Burns, a University of Florida anthropology professor emeritus and author of “Maya in Exile,” said by email.
He estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people of Mayan heritage may live in Florida today, but due to linguistic discrimination and pressure to learn English, the number who speak an indigenous language is likely much lower.
Still, Mayan languages have a local presence. In 2018, three Spanish-speaking officers responded to a domestic violence call in Gainesville only to find the victim, who was from Guatemala, didn’t speak Spanish.
UF social science researcher Miranda Carver Martin led a 2024 study that found, among many other factors, limited Spanish proficiency made some north central Florida farm workers particularly vulnerable to disasters.
Martin interviewed community-based health workers who engage with area farmworkers. “Here I have people who speak Zapotec, Tecomán, Mam, Otomí,” said one. “Spanish is difficult for them, imagine English is even more difficult.”
Another described linguistic discrimination against non-Spanish speakers, saying they asked a man if he spoke a Mayan language, “and he said that he'd rather not answer. I don't know if sometimes people give him grief.”
No county in north central Florida provides emergency information in Mayan languages and interpreters are hard to find. Due to “overwhelming demand” nationwide, Cadena had to post a notice on the Maya Interpreters website: “Some languages by appointment only.”
Of course, extreme weather doesn’t wait for an appointment.
The kids of disaster comms
In December 2021, a deadly tornado outbreak charged through four states in four hours. Joseph Trujillo-Falcón, a hazard researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, interviewed community members in Kentucky about emergency alerts during the storm.
Many Guatemalan families in the area spoke the Mayan language K’iche’. “When that tornado came, they essentially played a game of telephone,” he said.
Local community leaders translated English tornado alerts to Spanish for their students, who in turn translated them to K’iche’ for their family members. As anyone who has played telephone could predict, the message deteriorated with each step.
Trujillo-Falcón said children serve a “big, big role” in communicating risk during disasters. “From one moment to the next, those cultural norms are broken and we see that the kids are saying to their parents: ‘get in your shelter now.’ That’s a very tough responsibility.”
Cadena remembers the responsibility well. “I saw it as almost normal, as part of my life,” she said. “Obviously when I grew up, I realized that it was super difficult [...] at an age as young as 15, 16 years old, you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Gracia Fernandez, Alachua County’s immigrant and language access coordinator, hopes to keep children out of this taxing role. In June, the county passed its Language Access Policy. It detailed plans for interpretation systems and vital document translation, including a clause that stipulates family members should not be used as interpreters.
Since the Florida Division of Emergency Management and all Florida counties receive federal dollars, they must abide by federal anti-discrimination measures including Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, among others.
The policies mandate that recipients take “reasonable steps to ensure meaningful access” to their programs and services for people with limited English proficiency.
But no exact threshold triggers a responsibility to provide multilingual messaging. “Federal guidance says that entities should develop language access plans,” explained Jake Hofstetter, a policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute. “It doesn't necessarily say that they must.”
The typical benchmark for translating vital written documents into a given language is when that group makes up 5% or 1,000 people in the population (whichever is less). That measure is a “safe harbor” to demonstrate compliance with Title VI, but not a binding requirement of it. California last year made the 5% threshold state law.
Gilchrist County, where 1,000 residents, or 5.9%, speak a language other than English at home, is among six counties in WUFT’s analysis that doesn’t offer in-house certified interpreters, Spanish-language social media or a call-in language line. Multilingual alerts are “something we’re looking into,” said Emergency Management Director Ralph Smith, “but not something we’ve ever needed.”
Auto translations, auto misunderstandings
Fernandez spent Hurricane Debby in Alachua County’s emergency management office, translating alerts to Spanish amid a flurry of action.
It was the first time the county, where more than 47,000 people (17.5%) speak a language other than English at home, offered real-time Spanish language social media alerts.
Ask Fernandez if automatic translation tools could’ve done the job, and she’ll laugh.
“There are absolutely times when it would be okay to say, you know, ‘I'm not really sure that we're understanding each other. Let me just whip out the little robot in my pocket that detects the language that you're speaking and automatically translates it into the language that I can understand,’” she said.
Emergency alerts and official documents, Fernandez emphasized, are not among those times.
“There should be the same standard in communication in English as there is in Spanish and Haitian Creole and Mandarin and Vietnamese, right?” she said. “That has to be done by a qualified professional.”
The National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center is the main voice of tornado and storm alerts throughout the U.S. In 2015, the Center translated its risk scale to help Spanish speakers understand storm severity.
Leadership didn’t know until six years later its scale was misleading Spanish speakers.
In 2021, Trujillo-Falcón and his team studied how Spanish speakers ranked risk words such as leve, elevado and moderado (the Center’s translations of slight, enhanced and moderate). Fewer than 10 people of the 1,050 surveyed ranked words in their intended order.
The team worked with linguists to design and evaluate a new scale, which the Center implemented in 2022.
In a separate study, Trujillo-Falcón found a similar misinterpretation of the National Weather Service and FEMA’s Spanish translations of a tornado “warning” and “watch.” When given a written description, 66% of English speakers and only 38% of Spanish speakers correctly identified a tornado watch.
Accurate, Spanish-language weather notifications can be the difference between safety and crisis.
A Guatemalan immigrant in Kentucky told Trujillo-Falcón that, during the 2021 tornado outbreak, they didn’t see any Spanish alerts about the tornado until ten minutes before it hit, saying if they had missed it, “I would have stayed upstairs.”
When the voice of authority is the voice of oppression
Even when multilingual emergency resources are available, Spanish and Mayan language speakers may hesitate to use them.
Miranda Carver Martin’s study lists more than two pages of barriers that make farmworkers in north central Florida especially vulnerable to disasters: job precarity, substandard housing conditions, lack of worker safety protections and anti-immigrant policies, to name a few.
Other researchers not affiliated with Martin’s study echoed one obstacle: fear of public entities.
“A lot of these communities don’t trust government agencies,” said Trujillo-Falcón. “Honestly, with the history that these agencies have, we can’t blame them.”
UF disaster researcher Jason Von Meding at the Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience said such distrust worsened when FEMA moved into the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2003.
“FEMA is in the same organization as ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], as border agencies that have separated families in our community,” Trujillo-Falcón added. “They have every right not to trust these organizations.”
Such mistrust may help explain why language-access needs can go unnoticed.
On the path to accessibility
Trujillo-Falcón remembers watching TV with his mom, who speaks only Spanish, when she asked a surprising question.
“Hey, aren’t those your categories?”
On screen, a bilingual meteorologist warned of severe weather using the risk categories Trujillo-Falcón helped design.
While the news was nerve-wracking, the Illinois researcher took pride in knowing this community-informed tool was making an impact.
“It was a very beautiful day,” he said with a smile.
Alachua County’s Language Access Plan and Trujillo-Falcón’s storm center collaboration are two of the ongoing efforts to improve multilingual alerts and build trust between government agencies and community members.
This year for the first time, the National Hurricane Center launched Spanish-language advisories. The National Weather Service, which has offered Spanish-language forecasts for 30 years, is piloting a new artificial intelligence tool to expand their translation offerings to Simplified Chinese, Samoan and Vietnamese, with more languages to come.
Meanwhile, community organizations continue to fill in gaps. Menéndez stays in touch with the families who called during Hurricane Debby. While work is scarce and the mosquitoes remain, the family of seven in Suwannee County is safe and dry.
Now it’s our turn to ask the question:
¿Qué debemos hacer? “What should we do?”
And to answer.
Resources:
- The Project S.A.L.U.D hotline (352-575-8024) offers Spanish-language support to callers from Alachua, Columbia, Marion, Levy, Gilchrist and Suwannee counties.
- Spanish-language infographics and information for hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, heat and more from the National Weather Service
- Videos and printed materials in Akateko, K’iche’, Mam, Mixteco, Ixil, Kreyol and Q’anjob’al on storm safety and other health topics from the Rural Women’s Health Project
- The National Weather Service maintains an English-Spanish dictionary of official weather terminology
If you believe you have been unfairly denied language access services from an agency that receives federal funding, you may be eligible to file a complaint with the Federal Coordination and Compliance Section.
Copyright 2024 WUFT 89.1
