Disaster Preparedness in Urban Immigrant Communities: Lessons Learned from Recent Catastrophic Events and Their Relevance to Latino and Asian Communities in Southern California

 Southern California is at high risk for a major natural disaster. Yet, few assessments have been made to discover how communities with large populations of Limited English Proficient (LEP) immigrants would fare in such an event. It has also not been established whether LEP immigrants who may be poor and have low levels of education have the information necessary to prepare for and survive a disaster, or whether the social networks, formats, and language in which they can successfully receive and respond to emergency information are in place.

To address these issues, examine past efforts, and build policy recommendations for the future, the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute (TRPI) and the Asian Pacific American Legal Center of Southern California (APALC) undertook a joint project that examined several LEP immigrant communities in Southern California. After conducting interviews with emergency service personnel, both in local governments and in nonprofit organizations, and holding focus groups with LEP community members in their native languages, we are able to provide the following findings about this important issue.