Floridians rely on critical information from the government during hurricanes and afterward for help with impacts like flooding.
But what if families -- like an estimated 39,000 households in Orange County -- don't speak English well? Will they get the information they need?
Despite some efforts at the local and federal levels, community leaders in Central Florida say that often they do not.
Inland flooding
National Weather Service predictions chief Greg Carbin said warmer seas, warmer air carrying more moisture, and slower-moving hurricanes carry the promise of even more rainfall and inland flooding.
A report published last year by the American Meteorological Society shows freshwater flooding accounted for 57% of deaths caused directly by a U.S. hurricane from 2013 to 2022. Before that, storm surge was the leading direct cause. (For about half of overall hurricane deaths, including traffic fatalities and carbon monoxide poisoning, the storm is considered an indirect cause.)
Carbin said rain "can be as deadly if not more deadly than any other hazard associated with a hurricane."
Dangers like flooding and storm surge -- often far from the center of the storm -- are why the National Hurricane Center is changing its forecast cone to focus, not on the track itself, but on potential impacts.
This year, with an above-average hurricane season predicted, warnings and other information about those dangers could be a matter of life or death.
En inglés, por supuesto
The Census Bureau estimates 570,000 Florida households don't speak English well. Most of those speak Spanish.
Teresa Chacón is one of those Floridians. During Hurricane Ian, the mother of two girls listened to Spanish broadcasts. Still, she learned what it meant for her family only when, shortly before the storm hit, firefighters visited their mobile home park in Apopka.
"The firefighters arrived and let us know we had to evacuate," she said, speaking in Spanish, "because, well, it was a high risk zone."
The firefighters came and went, handing out flyers.
"En inglés, por supuesto," Chacón said. That is to say, the handouts were in English, of course.
Fortunately, Chacón's daughter could translate.
A failure to reach out to non-English speaking residents in a language they understand before, during and after hurricanes has experts in disaster response, like Claire Knox at the University of Central Florida, scratching their heads.
She analyzed the approximately 6,000 tweets from Florida's local emergency managers around Hurricane Irma back in 2017.
Half of 1% were in Spanish.
"[I]t was shocking," she said, "for us as researchers to see that very few of the tweets were in any language other than English."
And half of those Spanish tweets were simply retweets of FEMA posts.
Five years later, during Hurricane Ian, 1% were in Spanish.
A vulnerable population
Knox studies social equity in emergency management -- policies that recognize disasters affect different populations differently.
"So some are going to be more resilient," she said, "and some are not. But a lot of the underlying social issues that are underlying when there's not a disaster, really get amplified."
Community leaders say non-English-speaking residents are especially vulnerable because of language and cultural barriers and distrust of the government.
The Reverend José Rodriguez, an Episcopal priest and Hispanic leader in Orlando, says hurricane outreach needs to communicate in the language of the impacted person.
"So you would have to have culturally competent individuals that can not only translate information, but can transmit it in a way it can be received and understood," Rodriguez said.
"Speak to us, as if you were Univision reporting the news," he said, "not CNN or Fox News reporting to their audience. Cater to the audience of Latinos."
Rodriguez said faulty assumptions about the Hispanic population — with its diverse nationalities — can lead to distorted messages that cause people to do the opposite of what's needed.
For example, he said, it can be hard to truly reach older immigrants who need to evacuate due to flooding — to leave a house that represents the American dream and a legacy for their children.
At the Spanish-speaking Episcopal Church of Jesus of Nazareth, Rodriguez said he has had to broadcast a specific message to the seniors they serve: "Your life is worth more than your house."
Addressing the problem, or not
After Hurricane Ian, the State Emergency Response Team reviewed Florida's performance and found no problem with its public communication, calling it a strength, not an area for improvement.
"External communication and public outreach strategies successfully informed the public," according to the after-action report.
As for what's online, Florida's emergency management website uses Google Translate to make the pages available in 133 languages but the links to new information often lead to English-only content.
Emergency management sites for Orlando and Orange County can also be viewed in Spanish — again often linking to English-only pages. Readers can also see the city website in Portuguese and Haitian Creole.
Some officials and nonprofits are focused on the problem.
There's legislation moving through Congress to study and test better hurricane communication with older residents, disabled people and non-English speakers. It was sponsored by Democrat Maxwell Frost and Republican Daniel Webster, both of Central Florida.
The Biden Administration has made social equity as a top goal. Last month, FEMA announced a targeted campaign in six languages -- including Spanish and Creole -- with messages about flood risk and flood insurance.
And this year for the first time, the National Hurricane Center is providing all its public advisories in Spanish. Federal officials are also testing artificial intelligence to translation weather information in multiple languages.
In Central Florida, some emergency managers are working with nonprofits to reach immigrant communities.
For example, division manager Steven Lerner with Seminole County's Office of Emergency Management said the county works with trusted community agents -- including local grocery stores -- to help Spanish-speaking residents prepare and get resources.
The county uses contractors to translate notifications, Lerner said. "Obviously, getting the message into another language doesn't happen as quick as it does in English, but it happens very soon after."
Nonprofit outreach
Chacón, the Spanish-speaking mom in Apopka, said her family received food, water and other assistance from Hope CommUnity Center during Hurricane Ian. The nonprofit's executive director, Felipe Sousa-Lazaballet, says staff and volunteers -- including a bunch of teenagers -- tried to bridge the communication gap.
"[W]e knew that our community, mostly immigrants, did not know the information ... perhaps even didn't know that there was a hurricane coming," Felipe Sousa-Lazaballet said. "And we began calling every one of our program participants."
Sousa-Lazaballet said that, for many of them, it was the first time they heard about the hurricane or got information on how to prepare.
"That is a common thread really," he said. "When it comes to critical resources, life-saving resources and information that can literally mean somebody gets to live or die, it doesn't reach people who don't speak English as their first language."
During the storm, the center posted three phone numbers on social media for questions in Portuguese, Spanish and Creole, and used WhatsApp to reach the immigrant community from Brazil.
Sousa-Lazaballet said the center works closely with Orange County and the city of Apopka and is considered a resiliency hub.
Sousa-Lazaballet said he thinks the county should employ more immigrants, which might have prevented a miscue during Hurricane Ian, an announcement that IDs were required for sandbags.
When that happened, he said, "everybody believed that even shelters were going to ask for IDs. And as you may know, undocumented immigrants are not allowed to get driver's licenses, and people were afraid. So we had to go on a mini-campaign to create information instead of misinformation."
No warning
Earlier this month, 81-year-old Gladys Forbe sat in her flood-damaged home in Orlo Vista and spoke in Creole -- with the help of an interpreter -- about her experiences during Hurricane Ian.
That night she had no idea what was coming.
Forbe said, she "went to sleep, went to bed, and then all of the sudden water was in the bed."
She was rescued through a window and taken away in a boat.
Since then, Forbe said she's had no communication from the government, except to cancel her food stamps and Medicaid after her insurance paid out.
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