When a strong earthquake occurs, the ShakeAlert earthquake early warning system triggers organizations to send alerts through phones in California, Oregon, and Washington that are expected to experience strong shaking. The warning may give people valuable seconds to drop, cover, and hold on. In the moments after an earthquake, other audible clues such as the sounds of things falling or the crackle of fire can alert people of lingering danger.
But those in the deaf and hard of hearing (DHH+) community may not notice these signals, putting them at greater risk of harm than hearing people. Statistics from past earthquakes reflect the disparity: The fatality rate for the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan, for example, was more than 4 times higher among Deaf people than among hearing people, according to the Kobe Deaf Association.
Research regarding the effectiveness of earthquake early warning systems such as ShakeAlert within the DHH+ community is virtually nonexistent. But a group of Deaf scientists is studying the issue, interviewing DHH+ community members about their experiences with earthquake early warning. They presented their results on 10 December at AGU’s Annual Meeting 2024 in Washington, D.C.
“Technology takes off without our input, our feedback, or our opinions,” signed Kota Takayama, a social worker at Gallaudet University and a coauthor on the new research who is deaf. “The technology becomes pointless because it’s not helping us; they didn’t ask us what we needed.”
Accessible Alerts
For an earthquake early warning system to be effective, a person must receive the alert, understand the message of the alert, and know what to do. The research team held dialogue sessions with eight students in the DHH+ community who had each experienced an earthquake to learn about their experiences with earthquake early warning systems—both the alerts themselves and the extent to which training and prior education influenced their ability to respond to the alerts.
All participants reported that they preferred receiving alert messages in English, though one deafblind participant noted that text-based alerts can be inaccessible to screen readers and incompatible with braille pads that translate text into an accessible format.
In 2023, the Federal Communications Commission adopted rules requiring wireless providers to make wireless emergency alerts available in American Sign Language (ASL). The agency is currently seeking community input about the effectiveness and format of ASL videos that could be included in alerts.
“The incidental information is very limited for [those in the DHH+ community] who are widely marginalized from emergency information and training,” signed Audrey Cooper, a late hard of hearing linguistic and public anthropologist at Gallaudet University and a coauthor on the new study. “When a disaster does happen, it exacerbates the situation for the community because they have little information to rely on.”
According to the research team, an accessible earthquake early warning system would include more visual and haptic cues, as well as additional options for different languages within text alerts. Earthquake early warning alerts should come from places other than one’s mobile phone, too, such as alerts on public transportation, on television, or from a wearable smart watch, signed Takayama. But more research is needed to determine exactly what would make an earthquake early warning system the most accessible for the DHH+ community, the team said.
ShakeAlert has partnerships with some organizations already implementing non–cell phone alert delivery. Some commuter rail systems in Southern California use ShakeAlert to automatically slow trains, and one school district in Washington sends earthquake alerts through its public address system. Other partnerships include a hospital, college campus, fire station, and water utility systems.
“Oftentimes, these systems and software weren’t built considering accessibility,” said Carson MacPherson-Krutsky, a natural hazards researcher at the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder who was not involved in the new research. The new research is “really important and really exciting,” especially because most of the authors have lived experience in the DHH+ community, something unusual in hazard research, she said.
Robert de Groot, a ShakeAlert operations team lead, said the ShakeAlert project has been communicating with the research team and other linguistically diverse communities to advance the goal of “earthquake early warning for all.”
“USGS ShakeAlert and its state partners are intent on making sure that what they learn from their research actually gets put to use immediately,” he said.
Before Disaster Strikes
Though changes to actual alert systems are important, Takayama emphasized that the bulk of the accessibility improvements needed are to community-based earthquake preparedness and training. “We need to include DHH+ people earlier,” he signed.
Participants in the study reported that they were relying primarily on informal networks, such as their families or other members of the DHH+ community, for information on how to respond to the alerts. Seven of the eight participants reported that either before or after receiving the initial alerts, they would have liked access to expanded contextual information in ASL and Pro-Tactile American Sign Language, which describes how to respond to alerts.
“The potential for partnering with the disability community is huge here.”
Many DHH+ people experience “dinner table syndrome,” a term that describes the isolation and exclusion that occur when DHH+ people surrounded by hearing people are excluded from conversations. This routine exclusion leads to gaps in knowledge about all kinds of important information, including earthquake preparedness information. Earthquake trainings that occur in schools are not always accessible to DHH+ students, either, said Michele Cooke, a structural geologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a coauthor on the new study who is deaf.
There is “no public information in advance to share with the whole DHH+ community as to what they can expect when these kinds of emergencies happen,” Cooper signed.
In their 2024 paper revealing the dearth of research on earthquake early warning and the DHH+ community, Takayama, Cooper, Cooke, and their coauthors stressed that DHH+ people must be included in conversations about how to improve disaster alert systems and trainings for these systems to be actually accessible to the community.
“The potential for partnering with the disability community is huge here,” Cooper signed.“If scientists, public engagement people, and trainers just reach out to [DHH+] community members, that’s where they’re going to get all these cool ideas about how to make the whole system better.”
Removing barriers for DHH+ scientists is key to making disaster response systems accessible, too, Takayama signed. “We need more of them.”