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Preliminary Multilingual Survey Results on San Diego County’s Sd Emergency Multi-Hazards App to Improve Equity in Disaster Risk Reduction

Description: 

The USGS and its partners began testing public alerting with ShakeAlert® earthquake early warning (EEW) to cell phones in California in October 2019 and in Oregon and Washington in 2021. Public EEW aims to reach individuals' devices before strong earthquake shaking occurs, so they can take protective actions such as ‘Drop, Cover, and Hold On’ (e.g., McBride et al., 2021). Individuals can receive a ShakeAlert-powered alert on their cell phones via various smartphone applications, including the University of California-Berkeley’s MyShake and San Diego County (SDC)’s SD Emergency app. However, there have been few tests to best understand if people who downloaded an early warning app remain engaged for the long-term, which could inhibit their usefulness. Further, the apps are likely missing individuals who speak English as a second language or who have limited English proficiency (LEP). California hosts the largest LEP population (>20% of residents) in the United States. SDC (and their app SD Emergency) serves a diverse community of over 3.3 million people with a population of ~34% Hispanic/Latinx in ethnicity and hosts a large immigrant and refugee population that speaks varied languages. We surveyed SDC residents to find out about (1) their earthquake experiences; (2) their hazard warning experiences; (3) their familiarity with the SD Emergency app and whether they use the app for EEW or other hazards such as wildfire; (4) barriers to alert comprehension; (5) their anticipated responses to EEW; and (6) potential improvements to the app that would best fit their language requirements. We will highlight preliminary results from the surveys offered in English, Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Arabic, and Vietnamese, which were the languages that SDC was most interested in. Building language equity into EEW broadly will help accomplish the United Nations Sendai Framework’s disaster risk reduction goals to "substantially increase the availability of and access to multi-hazard early warning systems and disaster risk information and assessments to people by 2030".

Session: End-to-End Advancements in Earthquake Early Warning Systems [Poster Session]

Type: Poster

Date: 5/3/2024

Presentation Time: 08:00 AM (local time)

Presenting Author: Danielle

Student Presenter: No

Invited Presentation: 

Authors