NORMAN, Okla. — As the winds howled and sirens blared, the local television meteorologist delivered urgent instructions. A massive EF-5 tornado appeared to be spinning toward the Oklahoma City metro. Take shelter. Get underground.
The critical warnings, though, came only in English.
Samuel Cifuentes and Florinda Santos spoke only Spanish. They were making a new life in Oklahoma City after relocating from Guatemala. Unfamiliar with the risks of life in Tornado Alley, the couple and their son, along with cousin Yolanda Sarat-Santos and her three children, fled from their home. They sought refuge in a nearby storm drain and did not survive the floodwaters that came with the storm.
More than a decade later, this 2013 storm is what Joseph Trullijo-Falcón says inspires his work on alert systems that translate warnings into Spanish — and eventually, other languages, too.
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“Time and time again a monolingual emergency system prevents people from taking protective action,” he said. “For those that have just moved to this country and don’t have experience with things like tornadoes, that information is a matter of life and death.”
Sitting in front of supplies delivered from around the world to storm survivors, NOAA researcher Joseph Trujillo-Falcón prepares to survey Spanish-speaking residents about their experience receiving severe weather alerts. Photo courtesy of Joseph Trujillo-Falcón
Trujillo-Falcón, a researcher at the University of Oklahoma and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Norman helps lead a team of Spanish-speaking scientists and meteorologists working to ensure that Spanish-speaking communities are just as informed as English speakers during life-threatening weather events. They study disaster communication and response for Hispanic and Latinx immigrant populations in the aftermath of severe storms around the country, fine-tuning alerts and developing new ones as they go.
When severe weather strikes, especially during peak tornado season between April and June, up-to-the-minute information is crucial, Trujillo-Falcon said. His team focuses mostly, for now, on tornadoes and other extreme weather that can happen in the spring — high winds, hail and heavy rains. For non-English speaking households across the U.S., the language barrier can turn disastrous.
“During some of the deadliest storms of the past few years, often the only way information and warnings about those events made it so immigrants depended on whether they had someone in their social network who spoke English,” he said. “That’s not reliable for everyone, and it puts too many people at risk.”
Storm culture often lost in translation
In the last decade, Hispanic and Latinx communities have grown considerably in the southeastern United States, where severe weather can be sudden and volatile.
Some counties in this region nearly tripled their Hispanic and Latinx populations since 2010. The foreign-born population has increased by 21 percent in Arkansas, 34 percent in Kentucky, 18 percent in Missouri and 27 percent in Tennessee in the same time period, according to NOAA’s analysis of Census data.
Over the past five years, teams across the National Weather Service, under NOAA, have translated educational materials like radar graphics and other prediction tools. In recent years, significant advancements have been made in Oklahoma, with emergency alerts now being translated and delivered directly to phones.
The federal government’s Wireless Emergency Alerts system, which launched a year before the El Reno tornado, sends out National Weather Service storm warnings. The public safety system now includes translated text if a user’s phone language is set to Spanish. Receiving these alerts in Spanish, though, depends on the wireless carrier and device settings.
Despite these improvements, most official weather bulletins from the National Weather Service and FEMA’s national alerts are still only sent out in English.
Trujillo-Falcón and his team at NOAA are trying to change that. They trace the paths of storms by overlaying U.S. Census data to find out where communities are being overlooked. They travel to the areas hit by large-scale weather events, working with local partners and fellow meteorologists to survey residents about the alerts they receive, and identify who had little warning and why.
After a late 2021 tornado outbreak hit Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas and Illinois, researchers from NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory conducted a weeklong field study of these vulnerable populations to learn how they received, understood, and responded to tornadoes and the severe weather communication around them.
Joseph Trujillo-Falcón, a researcher at the University of Oklahoma and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, walks into an area of Mayfield, Kentucky, damaged by a 2021 tornado in 2021 to speak with Spanish-speaking residents. Photo courtesy of Joseph Trujillo-Falcón
They found that Hispanic and Latinx populations in these areas often relied on their communities for forewarning of potentially dangerous storms. Social media posts and community groups were often the only sources for translated forecasts. They did not have the same knowledge of common safety precautions, like taking shelter in the lowest part or center of a home.
“The weather, water, and climate enterprise must rise to the challenge and serve these communities, starting with creating communications they can receive, understand, and use,” the group’s report read. “After all, the NWS mission statement vows to protect all life and property.”
America Gaviria started working for NOAA in 2022 after her move from Puerto Rico to the U.S., to pursue her master’s degree at the University of Oklahoma. In her studies Gaviria looks at the culture of storms and how people interpret different weather alerts.
America Gaviria, aNOAA researcher, speaks with storm survivors from Jonesboro, Arkansas, to learn about their experience with severe weather in Tornado Alley. Photo courtesy of America Gaviria
For instance, Spanish speakers come from different parts of Latin America and Central America. Gaviria’s work focuses on how to make translations of critical messages more culturally relevant to groups from different places.
“We found that some translations don’t convey the kind of urgency that some of these situations need,” she said. “I feel like we are helping give a voice to these communities during a time that can be really frightening, especially if you’re not used to tornadoes or other severe weather events.”
For one family the team interviewed in Mayfield, Kentucky, alerts in Spanish most likely saved their lives.
Rosa, as she’s identified in the team’s research, is a Guatemalan immigrant. She recalled that while watching weather coverage with her family from the second floor of their house, she received three alerts in English. Finally, a fourth alert came in Spanish warning her to take shelter in the lowest level of the house.
“I would have stayed upstairs,” Rosa said. I was not looking at [an information source] that told me it was going to get ugly [so I was not taking protective action].”
An EF-4 tornado roared through the small town of fewer than 10,000 with wind shears that peaked at 188 mph. The storm tore away the second story of Rosa’s house, but her family had taken cover and remained safe. Twenty-two people were killed in and around Mayfield as a result of that event, with hundreds more injured.
Trujillo-Falcón and Gaviria said that unless language disparities for emergency communications are addressed, underserved groups will continue to be disproportionately affected. Gaviria said the team would like to expand its work to other weather events, including hurricanes, extreme cold, extreme heat.
“We are just getting started keeping people safe,” Gaviria said. “A lot of people don’t experience the same weather that we have here in the U.S. so there’s an education component to this work too.”
“It’s complicated but it’s so important,” she added.
There is other work around storm communications, she added, including relaying essential information to undocumented people outside of emergency situations. They are allowed inside public storm shelters, for instance, and in some instances qualify for disaster relief, but often are too scared to come forward to claim it.
Spanish-speaking meteorologists feel the pressure
Without the kind of alerts Trujillo-Falcón and team are developing, it often falls to bilingual meteorologists and staff to share important weather updates on social media or respond to comments in Spanish.
Osmany Eltiempo started as the chief meteorologist for Telemundo Oklahoma a year ago after moving to the U.S. from Cuba. Eltiempo said he’s learning about the area’s distinct mix of severe weather while also trying to give accurate forecasts that keep people safe.
“I’m learning a lot because the climate is so different,” Eltiempo said, through a translator. “Forecasts here affect the community a lot. The possibility of death and destruction is very real, and people’s businesses are on the line. I feel that pressure.”
In addition to his on-air forecasts, Eltiempo is also active on his professional Facebook page where he delivers updates on potentially dangerous storms throughout the day.
“Oklahoma weather is unique, small storms can pop up at any moment and be very destructive,” he wrote in a Facebook post during a stormy day in May.
The post had several comments thanking him for his forecasts and warnings in Spanish.
“Thank you for keeping an eye on us all,” one Oklahoma City resident wrote.
The next wave of alerts and forecasts for all languages
The next wave of translation for severe weather alerts is already in the works.
National Weather Service forecasters are training artificial intelligence software to understand weather and climate terms in Spanish and simplified Chinese and have plans to add Samoan and Vietnamese, with more languages to follow.
Outside of Trujillo-Falcón’s work, the National Weather Service also launched an experimental language translation website in October and is open for public comment through the end of September.
“(This) allows them to focus more time on their core duties of forecasting and decision support services,” Bozeman said.
Trujillo-Falcón’s days in Norman and on the team for NOAA are coming to an end. He accepted a faculty position at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in its climate, meteorology, and atmospheric sciences department.
Trujillo-Falcón, a Peru native and recipient of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, said he’s proud of the work he’s accomplished in Oklahoma. He also felt connected to the people he interviewed while navigating storms of Oklahoma in his first few years here. He fondly remembered the first time he received a Spanish-language alert for an EF-2 tornado in Norman four years ago.
He hopes to continue partnering with NOAA and OU in the future to advance the work the team started to make severe weather alerts available to all.
“We’ve carved out such important work here and opened up a nationwide conversation about this,” he said. “That’s a legacy I’m proud to leave behind.”
