Wireless Emergency Alerts in Spanish: Benefits and Opportunities for Improvement

Prior to an imminent threat, official alerting authorities issue short alerts to all mobile carriers within a geo-targeted area. Known as Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA), the short, or terse, messages are limited to 360 characters if a user’s phone can access a 4G-LTE network; otherwise, they receive 90-character messages (FEMA n.d.). Additionally, the alerts are associated with a unique ringtone and vibration to alert local populations. While initial research has provided deep insight into what should be in an “effective” warning message (e.g., Mileti and Sorensen 1990; Wood et al. 2018), there is limited knowledge about how multilingual populations understand different WEA messages (Ellcessor 2022).
In 2019, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) announced new updates to their WEA platform (FEMA nd.). Among their new features, FEMA added support for Spanish-language WEAs to users that 1) set their phone’s language to Spanish and 2) have access to a 4G LTE network. In June of 2020, the National Weather Service (NWS) announced that all weather-hazard WEAs would be automatically translated to Spanish (NWS n.d.). Since then, bilingual speakers have received life-saving information across most mobile devices. While this is a notable achievement across the weather enterprise, no study has explored the utility of WEA alerts in other languages and whether the 90- and 360- character formats are effective (or not).
Through a nationwide survey of 2,000 U.S. Spanish speakers and follow-up phone interviews with interested participants, we explored the utility of 90-and 360- character WEA messages in Spanish. Specifically, we examined 90- and 360- character tornado Spanish WEAs provided by the NWS. Using Mileti and Sorensen’s (1990) Warning Response Model, we asked participants how well they understood, believed, and personalized the message received. Following advances in theory (Sutton et al. 2021), we also examined a participant’s self-efficacy, or their belief that they are able to take protective action. In the qualitative interviews, we gathered rich insight into possible improvements for WEA alerts so that they resonate with the communities they serve. We will provide broad recommendations for FEMA and the NWS so that these efforts can be successfully implemented in other languages as well.