Public Perceptions of Wireless Emergency Alerts in Spanish

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 30 phone interviews with U.S. Spanish-speaking 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 and response-efficacy, or their belief that they are able to take protective action and that the action is helpful, respectively. Through qualitative interviews, we gathered rich insight into possible improvements for WEA alerts so that they resonate with the communities they serve. We provide broad recommendations for government agencies to improve the technology and highlight ways how broadcasters can spread awareness of the new technology for multilingual speakers.