At 3:30am on the morning of March 11, Reyna Ruiz was awakened by a knock on her door. It was her neighbor, warning her that a tsunami was headed toward Santa Cruz. Ruiz is the director of the Beach Flats Community Center, which serves a neighborhood of 1,068 residents, 82 percent of them Spanish-speakers and 40 percent monolingual, according to 2000 census figures. All over Beach Flats, people had begun getting phone calls from family members beginning at 1am. “By 5:30,” Ruiz said, “everyone had left.”
When a reverse 911 call went out at 6:47am, hardly anyone there was around to hear it. Beach Flats, which is in the tsunami inundation zone, was already empty. And a monolingual resident might have hung up anyway, Ruiz says. “It didn’t start out, ‘This is a bilingual message; es un mensaje bilingue.’ It was all in English—then a huge pause—and then the Spanish version.”
In Watsonville, which is located far enough inland not to be threatened by a tsunami but where similar demographics prevail—55 percent of the population told census-takers they don’t speak English “very well”—events played out differently. Beginning early in the morning, there were runs on gas stations in the area. At 7:04am the police dispatcher took down this report: “Residents are panicking trying to get gas, street is blocked and people are in disturbances, almost fighting.”
“We saw that people were lining up at gas stations causing some traffic problems,” says Lt David McCartney of the Watsonville Police Department. There were also reports of cars filling the pullouts along Highway 152, and of people from Watsonville seeking refuge inland at Casa de Fruta and Gilroy, McCartney notes.
No One Home
In the days and weeks that followed the tsunami, rumors circulated blaming Spanish-language radio and television for sensationalizing the tsunami and causing panic in the community. It has proven difficult to substantiate such reports, though, because there was virtually no local media delivering crucial emergency information in Spanish on March 11.
Erandi García, an anchor on the local Univision TV affiliate, worked a regular shift on March 11: she came on at 2:30pm and stayed until 11pm. No one was on air in the morning, she says, because Univision, like its competitor Telemundo, only broadcasts evening newscasts. On weekday mornings both networks show national programs. That morning, images from a devastated Japan would have been the order of the day.
A similar phenomenon exists on radio—the two Spanish-language signals in the Santa Cruz area have minimal local staff on air. Radio Lazer, broadcast out of Felton on 93.7, is simulcast on 13 stations across the state. A local DJ is on air only between 11am and 3pm; all other programming is sent from headquarters in Oxnard. El Estero Sol broadcasts in Santa Cruz on channel 99.1, but operates entirely out of San Francisco. Same for Super Estrella—broadcast in Salinas on channel 107.1, it is beamed out of Los Angeles.
Rosemary Chalmers, program director for KSCO, broadcasted live the morning of the tsunami updating listeners as information became available. Chalmers requested that an official from the Office of Emergency Services record a message in Spanish to broadcast on her station after hearing there was no local Spanish radio broadcasting live. Some listeners complained, but Chalmers says she did the right thing. “I believe that public safety was compromised because (Highway) 17 was doing 3 miles an hour and 152 wasn’t moving, and those were direct reports I got from dozens and dozens of listeners,” Chalmers says. “It became very apparent that there was nothing they could tune to.”
Erandi García came to the same conclusion as Chalmers. “People were just crazy trying to get out of Watsonville and Santa Cruz because they had no information in Spanish,” García said. “There was not a Spanish media [outlet] that could tell them, you know, ‘Everything is going to be OK,’ until 6:30 when we went on air, and I guess by that time it was a little bit late.”
The Minot Effect
By then, most residents were back in their homes, finally confident that they were out of the way of certain danger. For the 20 hours preceding, though, residents of Watsonville and Beach Flats made do with the limited and unverified information they received in the form of panicked phone calls from friends and family while watching terrifying satellite images from Japan with no local resource to explain how the tsunami would play out in their neighborhoods.
What is striking, given the apparent lack of news available to the local Spanish-speaking communities, is how quickly word spread. Eric Newton, senior adviser to the president of the Knight Foundation for Advancing Journalism, isn’t surprised. “Even though the media ecosystem is quite complicated, news finds a way,” he says. “It flows agnostically—news doesn’t care whether it’s going by phone or by word of mouth or by newspaper.”
A dearth of reliable news media in times of crisis can have dangerous implications. Newton cites a famous example in the town of Minot, N.D. when, in 2002, a freight train derailed, unleashing a cloud of toxic ammonia. The protocol called for responders to alert the radio stations, but because of recent legislation that allowed the merger of radio stations, there were no live staffers to answer the calls.
“The firefighters called the local radio stations and they were just robots, and so there was no one to tell about the toxic spill,” Newton says. “So the firefighters in the 21st century had to walk door-to-door in Minot to tell people about a toxic spill—which, when you think about it, is really bad because you have to open the door to hear that you shouldn’t open the door.”
News found the residents of Beach Flats and Watsonville. “If that news wasn’t as useful as it could have been,” Newton says, “then the community needs to ask itself, ‘What are we doing to help everybody understand what the latest news is on the important situation that we want everyone to know about—whether it’s a toxic spill or earthquake or a tsunami or flood or whatever?’”
A TSUNAMI PREPAREDNESS MEETING for Watsonville residents is Wednesday, May 4, 7pm at the Civic Plaza Community Room, 275 Main St., Watsonville. 831.454.4733.
