Spanish-speaking Shadow Wood Mobile Home Park residents cannot receive weather alerts about tornados or severe storms because there are no Spanish-language services in Champaign.
“I know there is no access to Spanish language services at any of the mobile parks in Champaign and Urbana,” Urbana School District 116 Latino Family Liaison Lucia Maldonado said in an interview. “Every time the tornado alarm goes off, I get calls from families who are wondering what to do.”
Due to this lack of Spanish emergency weather services, Maldonado said residents are often recommended to seek shelter elsewhere but don’t always feel comfortable reaching out for help due to a language barrier.
“I had received calls in the past from people from Shadow Wood and other mobile parks in Urbana who needed police support, but due to lack of trust and fear, they didn’t call,” Maldonado said.
Shadow Wood does not have a designated storm shelter for residents. In 2011, CU-CitizenAccess reported some Shadow Wood residents sought safety beneath the overpass of Interstate 74.
The National Severe Storms Laboratory severe weather guide notes “overpasses may be one of the worst places to seek shelter from a tornado as they can actually put you at a much greater risk of being killed or seriously injured by flying debris.” The laboratory is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The Census Reporter notes that there are 271 mobile homes in Shadow Wood, which is located just south of I-74 and borders Oak and Market Street. Census data also shows Shadow Wood makes up 15% of the housing in Census Tract Seven as of 2022.
The tract stretches one square mile west to east from Prospect Avenue to Oak Street and north to south from Interstate 74 to Market Street in Champaign. It includes the Shadow Wood neighborhood and has 7.5 times the share of mobile homes in Champaign compared to other tracts.
John Dwyer, the Champaign Emergency Management Agency (EMA) coordinator, said that while Spanish extreme weather and emergency reports aren’t available, other resources in the language are.
“We don’t have reports in Spanish, but we have a variety of disaster preparedness materials in Spanish,” Dwyer said.
Dwyer said the agency provides Spanish emergency resources to the New American Welcome Center and its Welcoming Week, a program of the University YMCA that supports and celebrates immigrants, and Project Read, an English literacy tutoring program for adults at Parkland College.
These resources include informational documents such as emergency supply lists, instructions on documenting and insuring properties and disaster preparation guides, which are available on Ready.gov.
The agency’s website does not provide emergency statements in Spanish. The agency’s official Instagram, Facebook and X accounts, which communicate community weather alerts, also lack a Spanish account.
Champaign County’s Census Tract Seven, with a population of 3,290, contains 95 households with limited English-speaking capabilities, according to the 2022 report from the United States Census Bureau. 599 individuals surveyed in Census Tract Seven speak a language other than English at home, making up 18.2% of the tract’s total population.
“The reality is that when you need help, it’s really hard to get help,” Maldonado said. “People don’t call 911 because it’s so incredibly difficult to communicate when you’re just starting to learn English and you don’t know how the systems work here.”
On a statewide scale, the Illinois Emergency Management Agency and Office of Homeland Security provide preparedness and recovery guides for natural disasters.
While the website housing these guides can be changed to six different languages with a button at the top of each page, the guides themselves are only available in English. Each guide contains safety tips, climate statistics, and how-tos for enduring seasonal weather features such as blizzards, severe thunderstorms and tornadoes.
The state agency directs people to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Weather Radio, in which the station’s transmitters “have a range of about 40 miles” to broadcast the latest weather alerts 24 hours a day, according to the Lightning Safety Awareness Guide.
NOAA Weather Radio, located on the National Weather Service website provides county-specific coverage for Champaign. It can be accessed on 162.550 MHz (frequency) with the call sign WXJ76 on radio transmitters.
The website also has a “Spanish Voice” page for Spanish weather information and alerts. However, the page is “en construcción,” which means “under construction” in English.
The page was documented as early as January 26, 2017, according to the Internet Archive, which saves web pages as they appeared throughout time.
The page also said: “Spanish language synthesized voice will be provided for any product received in Spanish language. In addition, transmitters serving a significant Hispanic population will begin broadcasts of automated generic Spanish translations of all emergency weather and natural hazard messages.” This statement was taken down before July 28, 2021, and replaced with “under construction.”
In February 2011, the City of Champaign released the Bristol Park Neighborhood Plan, a 71-page, English-only outline “to provide guidance to the City and a future neighborhood group for specific actions on how to revitalize the neighborhood.”
The plan’s first goal is public safety, which addresses the “long-term objective” of a Shadow Wood storm shelter.
“In the long term we expect to have a storm shelter that provides safe refuge for Shadow Wood residents during tornado events,” the city plan said.
The potential storm shelter site is just south of the Shadow Wood mobile home park on Market Street. Thirteen years after the plan was created, no shelter has been built.
“With the amount of money that is being injected to community organizations, there should be a crisis line now, but there isn’t,” Maldonado said. “Every time the alarms go off, people talk about the need for shelters, but then we all move on and forget about that conversation until the next time.”