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Burned buildings in Louisville, Colorado, in the wake of the Marshall Fire. (Credit: Glenn Asakawa/���� Boulder)

On Dec. 30, 2021, people living Colorado’s Boulder County began receiving urgent alerts on their phones. The Marshall Fire, which had started that morning, was growing, and county officials were urging some locals to evacuate their homes.

Those warnings likely saved lives. But, in the years that followed, revealed flaws in the alerting system. Many residents never received an alert, while those that did only received one in English.

A team of researchers at С���� Boulder’s has been working to understand how alerts can become more inclusive in Colorado. The group to further address such shortfalls.

Timely emergency alerts should go out to all people in Colorado who need them, the researchers say—including people with disabilities and people who speak languages other than English.

From left to right, Natural Hazards Center researchers Mary Angelica Painter, Melissa Villarreal and Carson MacPherson-Krutsky stop for a photo at the Colorado State Capitol before presenting their findings on inclusive emergency alerts. (Credit: Carson MacPherson-Krutsky)

“We know from the Grizzly Creek Fire in 2020 and the Marshall Fire a year later that when alerts don’t go out in multiple languages, it can cause real harm,” said Mary Angelica Painter, a research associate at the Natural Hazards Center. “When people do not receive alerts, they often seek information elsewhere, which might delay responses or provide inaccurate information.”

Alerting authorities can include emergency management offices, fire departments, 911 dispatchers and others. They may send out emergency alerts during wildfires, flooding, tornadoes or even hazardous traffic conditions. Alerting authorities may use avenues like cell phones, social media, TV and radio, word of mouth and other channels.

In a , Painter and her colleagues reported that alerting authorities across Colorado want to expand their alerting systems—reaching people who speak a non-English language or have auditory and visual disabilities. But authorities frequently lack the funding, staffing, training and guidance to make those changes.

To expand on that research, Painter and her team will host a series of focus groups to hear how residents who speak non-English languages receive, perceive and process emergency information.

“At the end of the day, our goal is to save lives,” Painter said. “To do that, we need to be sure that we’re communicating emergency information so that everyone can take protective actions.”

Patchwork of alerts

In 2023, the Colorado legislature passed , which tasked the Natural Hazards Center with conducting a survey of the state’s emergency alert systems. The bill recognized that such systems “need to reach and better support at-risk communities in a time- and language-sensitive manner.”

In Colorado, roughly 900,000 people speak languages other than English. Spanish is the most common language spoken, followed by Chinese, Vietnamese, German and Russian. Additionally, about 500,000 people with auditory and visual disabilities live around the state.

For this first phase of the project, the Natural Hazards Center surveyed 222 emergency response personnel from 57 of Colorado’s 64 counties.

In a , the researchers discovered a patchwork landscape, in which officials use a wide range of channels and resources to warn Coloradans about emergencies. Because of this, alerting varies from county to county, and even town to town. ��

In many cases, residents must sign up to receive emergency alerts through a third-party system, which often involves downloading an app. Across Colorado, alerting authorities reported sign-up rates below 40%.

More than a third of survey respondents didn’t know if their alert systems could support languages other than English.

“We know the information that's going out, but we don't have a sense of how that's landing or whether communities are even aware that they need to sign up for alerts,” said Carson MacPherson-Krutsky, a research associate at the Natural Hazards Center who led the 2024 project and report.

Among other issues, many emergency personnel in Colorado don’t have access to basic demographic information about who lives in their regions and what languages they speak.

On the ground

In the new project, which is funded by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, MacPherson-Krutsky and Painter have set out to address some of those gaps.

The research team partnered with the , the Colorado Language Access Coalition (CLAC) and the City of Boulder to work directly with communities on the ground in Colorado. The researchers and their partners are hosting 13 virtual and in-person focus groups across the state. The team already led one focus group this month in English for community organizations. Six of the remaining 12 focus groups will be in Spanish, three in Chinese and three in Vietnamese.

The team will ask multilingual Colorado residents how they get information during a wildfire, tornado or similar emergency. Do they know how to sign up for alerts? Do those alerts provide the information they need to take action during an emergency?

“What we’re hearing from emergency personnel is that we need more information about what’s happening on the ground,” MacPherson-Krutsky said. “Are these communities actually receiving alerts? If they’re translated, is the way that they’re translated understandable?”

Across the state, many regions are already trying to expand how they send alerts.

Boulder County, for example, has made a wide range of updates to its system since the Marshall Fire. Residents can now receive translated emergency messages in more than 130 languages by downloading an app from the company ReachWell.

Painter hopes that the team’s research will one day help keep communities safe beyond Colorado.

“How Colorado has set up its emergency alerting is emblematic of what’s happening in the rest of the country,” Painter said. “We hope that these lessons could be applied across the United States. Colorado could become a leader in multilingual emergency alerting and risk communication.”