Bilingual Skills Can Be Life, Death Matter : Emergency Personnel Need to Be Able to Better Communicate With Public They Serve

The complexity, the overcrowding and, finally, some of the barriers to communication in Santa Ana were all brought painfully to the county’s attention in the early days of 1993 by a single house fire on South Alder Street. The latter problem--that of communication between Spanish-speaking residents and often English-speaking emergency personnel--was apparent in the reported confusion over a Spanish-speaking mother’s pleas with English-speaking rescue workers over the fate of her 5-year-old son, who remained in the house and died along with two other people.

Santa Ana fire officials say that they are sensitive to rescue situations and doubt that the mother’s pleas were ignored by any of them--that it must have been somebody else on the scene. Whatever the truth of a confusing moment, community leaders are right to suggest that the incident highlights a larger continuing problem for their city and for others. That is the need for fire and police departments and others involved in rescue situations to have more bilingual employees.

The Santa Ana Fire Department reports that about 30% of its firefighters are bilingual, which is not as representative as the city’s 65% Latino population but is in fact a far higher percentage than in other Orange County communities. Santa Ana got moving in the late 1970s, when a federal judge ordered the city’s police and fire departments to hire more Latinos, and it since has made use of two hiring lists--one for bilingual applicants and another for everybody else.

Other communities, especially those with high Asian-American populations, need to do even more work to improve communications. Some now are reduced to borrowing someone with Spanish, Korean or Vietnamese language capabilities, and in La Habra, firefighters rely on whoever is available at a scene. Clearly, to save lives, to lend comfort and assistance, better communication skills are needed.