NEW YORK – New York Attorney General Letitia James has sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo and Acting Director of the National Weather Service Mary C. Erickson calling for expanded language accessibility for severe weather alerts.

Currently, warnings from the National Weather Service, which are issued in advance of a severe weather event, are not accessible in any language except for English and Spanish. In advance of Hurricane Ida, which devastated New York in September 2021, National Weather Service alerts were sent out to New Yorkers in only English and Spanish to warn them of the impending storm. The storm caused 18 deaths in New York, and the majority of those individuals were of Asian descent and did not speak or had limited proficiency in English or Spanish.

“Language should never be a barrier to critical information that could save lives,” James said. “The National Weather Service must work with other agencies to ensure that all immigrant communities can be effectively warned of future weather-related crises and given the equal chance to survive. It is our responsibility to keep our people safe, and to do so, we must expand language accessibility in our safety protocols.”

There are 700 different languages and dialects spoken in New York City. Nearly all the victims who lost their lives to the destruction from Hurricane Ida in New York City were immigrants from Trinidad, Nepal, and China, with primary languages that were neither English nor Spanish. Given the number of immigrants who speak languages other than English and Spanish, James urges the weather service to send alerts in at least the languages most commonly spoken by New York City residents with limited English proficiency: Chinese (both traditional and simplified), Russian, French Creole, Bengali, and Korean, in addition to Spanish.

New York City emergency management agency maintains an opt-in alerting system, known as NotifyNYC, and these alerts are available in numerous languages. However, city residents must proactively register their cell phone numbers and/or e-mail addresses in order to receive such alerts. There is no indication that most residents in immigrant communities are signed up to receive any such alerts.