OPENING REMARKS OF ZENJI NAKAZAWA 
PUBLIC SAFETY AND CONSUMER PROTECTION ADVISOR TO CHAIRMAN PAI
WORKSHOP ON PROMOTING THE USE OF MULTILINGUAL EMERGENCY ALERTING

WASHINGTON, DC

JUNE 28, 2019

Good morning, and welcome to the FCC.  I am pleased to be here on behalf of Chairman Pai, who asked that I extend his appreciation to each of you for participating in this important workshop on promoting the use of multilingual alerting.  

Emergency alerting—whether through the Emergency Alert System or Wireless Emergency Alerts—is a critical tool for public safety officials to keep their communities safe, especially when disaster strikes. 

The FCC has been actively working on multiple fronts to strengthen emergency alerting.  
For example, under Chairman Pai, the FCC has expanded the functionality and improved the geographic accuracy of Wireless Emergency Alerts.  

The FCC has also acted to make the Emergency Alert System more reliable, to help alert originators gain proficiency in using the system, and to help identify and prevent false alerts.  

  And we have coordinated with FEMA on nationwide emergency alert tests, assessing the results, and issuing our findings to address areas for improvement.  And, as you may have heard, another nationwide Emergency Alert System test is scheduled for August 7.

But none of this would be possible without your participation and partnership with the FCC.  Together, we are improving the reliability, security, and accuracy of alerting.  We are also ensuring that alerts are relevant to affected communities. 
 
And that’s where multilingual alerting comes in. 

For an emergency alert to be effective it needs to be widely accessible.  And that’s why the Commission is committed to ensuring that emergency alerts are available to non-English speakers as well as those who are deaf, hard of hearing and deaf-blind. 

But the Commission cannot do this alone.  And that is why this workshop is so important.  Today’s workshop brings together the best and the brightest to examine this issue head on.

So let’s take a preview of our panels.  

The first will provide a soup-to-nuts discussion of multilingual alert capabilities for both legacy (over-the-air) EAS alerts and those originating in the Common Alerting Protocol format for distribution through FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System.  

The second panel will look at how state and local authorities are successfully using multilingual alerting in their communities.

And the third panel will discuss how technology can enable alert content and emergency information to be distributed in multiple languages. 
   
I am confident that the information and experiences you share today will be helpful to all stakeholders in improving their own efforts to send and distribute alerts in multiple languages.  In addition, it is my hope that the workshop will help inform the Commission’s Intergovernmental Advisory Committee as it considers recommendations concerning multilingual alerting.  

Before I yield the floor to our distinguished panelists, I’d like to thank the outstanding team in our Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau and Office of Intergovernmental Affairs for organizing today’s workshop.  And special thanks to our panelists, some of whom traveled quite some distance to participate in today’s workshop. 

Thank you.