Nashville’s National Weather Service office now sending out safety messages in Spanish
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NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — During large weather events, real-time alerts can be life-saving; but until recently, in Middle Tennessee, those notifications from the Nashville office of the National Weather Service have only been in English.
To reach a wider audience and vulnerable communities, the Nashville office of the National Weather Service has started posting their safety messages on social media in Spanish, with hopes of expanding their outreach to the Spanish-speaking community in the future.
“This has been a push for the National Weather Service to address communities of need or vulnerable communities as we call them. And this could include a language barrier, it could include, the type of housing you live in, it could include your age group,” said Nashville’s National Weather Service Warning Coordination Meteorologist, Ryan Husted.
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According to the most recent US Census, 10.8% of Nashville’s population is Hispanic or Latino.
According to a Metro Nashville report, in 2000 about 10% of Nashville residents ages five and older spoke a language other than English. That number grew to 18.5% in 2018, with Spanish being the most common second language.
“Across the agency, we’ve been kind of working on this for five years or so. But it’s expanding, just like the Spanish-speaking population is expanding, as well,” Husted explained. “We’ve been having conversations for a while, but we haven’t necessarily had the tools to do it.”
(Source: NWS Nashville) (Source: NWS Nashville)
Over the past few months, NWS Nashville has been able to send their safety messages, like tornado watches and warnings, to their national office for translation.
Husted said NWS Nashville is also planning on hiring Spanish-speaking staff and doing more outreach to Spanish-speaking media outlets in the future.
However, NWS doesn’t want to stop at just the Spanish-speaking population, Husted is also working on ways to get messages out to communities that most likely aren’t seeing their messages at the moment.
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“We have Amish populations across Middle Tennessee, that we’re trying to figure out how we can reach them. There are people without internet, it’s well established that there’s a higher frequency of tornado and damaging wind deaths for those that live in mobile homes. So how can we cater more specifically to that community?”
NWS’s Nashville website and social media pages can be found here.
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