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Spanish speakers in Alachua County received a bit of hope amid the stress of area wildfires this week: the first countywide text alert in their native language.
Alachua County Emergency Management launched the Spanish-language text service last spring to better serve its 23,000 residents who speak Spanish at home. Sunday marked its first alert.
It’s off to a good start, said Adriana Menéndez, Assistant Director of the Gainesville-based Rural Women’s Health Project, which provides social services and health education to immigrant communities.
When residents near a wildfire on the north side of the city called Menéndez, “the first thing they told me was that they had received the alert on their phone,” she said. Police officers soon came knocking on the callers’ doors with instructions to evacuate and Menéndez helped them find friends or coworkers with whom they could stay.
“It makes me very proud to know that there are real results reaching real people,” said Gracia Fernandez, who writes the alerts.
While most counties in north central Florida use computer programs to automatically translate English-language alerts, Fernandez, the county’s language access coordinator, translates them by hand.
Direct translations of English words for weather risks don’t always convey the same urgency in Spanish, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Manual interpretation lets Fernandez match both the meaning and the tone of emergency managers’ messages.
About 50,000 Alachua County residents speak a language other than English at home, according to 2024 census data. Spanish speakers account for about half of this group. Haitian Creole, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Farsi and others account for the rest.
About 65 people have signed up for the county’s Spanish-language alerts so far, Fernandez said, short of the 200 person goal she set for the program’s first year.
Fernandez attributed part of the low enrollment to a quiet hurricane season in north central Florida last year. “It’s difficult to promote something that’s not tangible,” she said.
Hesitancy to trust government services could contribute to the low enrollment, too, Menéndez said. “The community tends to trust people like us that they already know,” she said, referring to the Rural Women’s Health Project. “They know that the information we give them is real.”
Menéndez promotes the county’s text service in the communities with which she works and, in conversations with emergency managers from other counties, has referenced it as a model.
“Suwannee County, in collaboration with us, started to make some posts in Spanish on its Facebook page,” she said. Levy and Marion counties, too, post Spanish-language information on social media despite no state law requiring multilingual emergency alerts.
Menéndez encourages residents who aren’t receiving emergency information in their native language to call their county to make their need known. If county officials field calls in Mandarin, Vietnamese and Spanish, she said, “they realize ‘this is necessary, we really need to make the change.’”
Back in Alachua County, Fernandez doesn’t yet have plans to expand emergency alerts to languages other than Spanish. Some projects have been put on pause amid federal and state scrutiny on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, she said, “but it’s not something I’ve forgotten.”
Residents can sign up for Spanish-language messages for disasters by texting ALACHUAESP to 888-777.
