At the beginning of last month, the National Weather Service, or NWS, discontinued its automated emergency-weather translation services in Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, and Samoan. The agency had decided not to renew its contract with Lilt, an AI-translation platform.
Then, just about three weeks after the contract lapsed, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, of which the NWS is a subagency, shared an update: The automated translation services would be back up and running as of Monday, April 28.
The agency’s back-and-forth turned April into a monthlong test case: How would communities around the U.S. fare without adequate information during extreme weather events?
In the span of a single week, belts of Louisiana were battered by flash flooding, while severe storms brought deadly hail and heavy rain to parts of Oklahoma and Texas, and a succession of destructive tornadoes touched down in nine states. Alarms flashed across screens and blared on radios warning people to get to safety. Many of th... Read more
