Hurricane Ian wrecked southwest Florida. Why weren’t there more warnings in Spanish?
There are over 350,000 Hispanic people in Southwest Florida, and exactly one Spanish-language local news program: Noticias WINK. But when Hurricane Ian threatened the region in September and the Fort Myers station switched over to broadcasting non-stop in English, Noticias WINK was relegated to Facebook Live and other social media platforms.
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One of the strongest storms in U.S. history, Ian ended up displacing thousands and reducing island towns to rubble. It was also the latest example of an inadequate forecast translation costing lives. In 2013, for example, a tornado in Oklahoma killed nine people from the state’s Guatemalan community, and a National Weather Service report found that the lack of severe weather information in Spanish may have contributed to their deaths.
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“A lot of people in the Hispanic community, they couldn’t get information,” says Marisol Perez, who lives in Naples, south of Fort Myers, and works in a local homeless shelter. Perez is bilingual but was nonetheless caught unaware by the storm and had to flee her flooded home, wading through four feet of water to escape. Many Spanish speakers she knows fared much worse. “They lost everything.”
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